Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated imagery by making participants (n=530)draw stick-figure drawings of sentences containing atransitive action ("She kisses him"). Previous findings showthat prominent features of meaning and sentence structure areplaced to the left in drawings, according to reading direction.We replicated three findings: the first mentioned element isplaced on the left more often, the agent is placed on the left,and the grammatical subject is placed on the left. We furthertested hypotheses related to deixis and gender. By addingadverbs (here and there), that work as demonstratives inDanish, we tested whether deictic proximity is translated intoa leftward bias. This hypothesis was not supported. Analysesof gender tested the presence of a gender identification and agender stereotype bias, where either own or male gender isgiven prominence and thus placed on the left. We wereunable to support for either of the gender hypotheses.