Going beyond the Spatial Agency Bias: Agentivity, prominence and the visuospatial depiction of transitive sentences

Abstract

When a person reads or hears a sentence, what kind of visuospatial representation do they construct? Prior work has proposed a Spatial Agency Bias, according to which people conceptualize events with a left-to-right trajectory, with  the left side associated with agency (at least in languages using left-to-right scripts). However, researchers disagree on the source and robustness of the Spatial Agency Bias. We suggest that a key obstacle stems from insufficient testing of how  agentivity relates to other concepts. We report two experiments manipulating voice, thematic role and word order. Our results point to a general Prominence Bias: 
Factors that make entities more prominent/salient favor left-side placement.