The psychological causality implicit in verbs: A review.

The authors comprehensively review research and theory on the verb causality effect. The effect involves the finding that different types of verbs used to describe interpersonal events give rise to different assumptions about the causes of the respective event. The authors analyze and conceptualize the linguistic categories that serve as independent variables in the pertinent studies, describe the research methods used, conduct reanalyses on the published data, and summarize the results. They conclude that the verb causality effect constitutes a robust and strong finding that has been documented by several independent researchers across different verb samples, cultures, languages, and age groups. Furthermore, they present and discuss the theoretical explanations for the phenomenon and argue that it can be explained parsimoniously by basic attribution mechanisms (i.e., perceived covariation information). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)