Abstract
To what extent is the choice of what to say driven by seemingly irrelevant cues in the visual world being described? Among such cues, how does prior description affect how we process spatial scenes? When people describe where objects are located their use of spatial language is often associated with a choice of reference frame. Two experiments employing between-participants designs (N = 490) examined the effects of visual cueing and previous description on reference frame choice as reflected in spatial prepositions (in front of, to the left of, etc.) to describe pictures of object pairs. Experiment 1 examined the effects of visual and linguistic cues on spatial description choice through movement of object(s) in spatial scenes, showing sizeable effects of visual cueing on reference frame choice. Experiment 2 monitored eye movements of participants following a linguistic example description, revealing two findings: eye movement “signatures” associated with distinct reference frames as expressed in language, and transfer of these eye movement patterns just prior to spatial description for different (later) picture descriptions. Both verbal description and visual cueing similarly influence language production choice through manipulation of visual attention, suggesting a unified theory of constraints affecting spatial language choice.
Highlights
Talking about the world involves making choices regarding the words, phrases, and sentences to use
In the no visual cue/no linguistic example condition 53% of people used the intrinsic frame for the first probe, but with an intrinsic visual cue this figure jumped to 86% and fell to 31% with a relative visual cue in the absence of a verbal example
This shows that visual cueing does exert a powerful influence on spatial description choice
Summary
Talking about the world involves making choices regarding the words, phrases, and sentences to use. These choices are constrained by a number of different information sources. Our choices are affected by what previous speakers have said about similar arrays and events. It has been shown that speakers’ choices of syntactic and lexical representations (Branigan et al, 2000; Cleland and Pickering, 2003), gestures (Henderson and Ferreira, 2004), and choices for joint reference (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Brown-Schmidt et al, 2005) are all affected by the previous behavior of an interlocutor. Linguistic choices – at least at the level of syntactic structure – are influenced by how attention is directed to a visual scene
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