Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Syntactic cues can lead people to infer trait-like qualities about novel agents (Gelman & Heyman, 1999). When anagent is described with a novel label, for instance, as a carrot-eater, children and adults are more likely to think that theagent has an enduring trait compared to an agent described as eating carrots all the time. Although novel labels mayinfluence peoples trait inferences in this way, it is less clear this effect would hold for more familiar, real-life descriptions.Here, we examined whether linguistic cues (i.e., noun vs. verb forms) influence peoples beliefs about lasting stabilityof symptoms associated with clinical disorders. Specifically, we examined whether describing a person as, for instance,having depression vs. feeling extremely depressed, would affect participants inferences about the stability of that personsdepression. We observed no effect of syntactic form on trait inferences. We discuss the implications of this work forpsychological science.