Abstract
We investigated how conceptually informative (referent preview) and conceptually uninformative (pointer to referent’s location) visual cues affect structural choice during production of English transitive sentences. Cueing the Agent or the Patient prior to presenting the target-event reliably predicted the likelihood of selecting this referent as the sentential Subject, triggering, correspondingly, the choice between active and passive voice. Importantly, there was no difference in the magnitude of the general Cueing effect between the informative and uninformative cueing conditions, suggesting that attentionally driven structural selection relies on a direct automatic mapping mechanism from attentional focus to the Subject’s position in a sentence. This mechanism is, therefore, independent of accessing conceptual, and possibly lexical, information about the cued referent provided by referent preview.
Highlights
Many psycholinguistic theories of sentence production suggest that selecting words, grammatical roles, and structural configurations are not arbitrary processes as they necessarily reflect the organization of the conveyed conceptual message via the rules of a regular interface between language and cognition (e.g., Bock, 1982; Jackendoff, 2002;Vigliocco and Hartsuiker, 2002; Myachykov et al, 2007)
The emphasis of this paper is on the interface between the speaker’s visual attention on the event’s referents, accessibility of the conceptual information associated with these referents, and the assignment of grammatical roles and consequent syntactic structures in a spoken sentence
To be coded as Passive Voice, the description had to employ a passivized transitive verb referring to the depicted event, a subject NP referring to the patient, and a by-phrase referring to the agent (e.g., The boxer is [being ] punched by the cowboy)
Summary
Many psycholinguistic theories of sentence production suggest that selecting words, grammatical roles, and structural configurations are not arbitrary processes as they necessarily reflect the organization of the conveyed conceptual message via the rules of a regular interface between language and cognition (e.g., Bock, 1982; Jackendoff, 2002;Vigliocco and Hartsuiker, 2002; Myachykov et al, 2007). The first necessary step in generating a sentence about this event is creating a non-linguistic conceptual plan of the event, or its message (Levelt, 1989) This message will be eventually translated into an emerging sentence via selecting words and assigning to them specific grammatical roles and positions in a syntactic structure. The speaker’s visual attention will guide the translation by progressively selecting information for processing This selection will be based on a number of parameters that make a particular referent, word, or structure more relevant, available, or conspicuous than the other available alternatives. This selection process already starts at the earliest stages of message apprehension when the non-linguistic properties of the event (including the relative salience of the interacting referents) are encoded. The boy will be coded in the message as the referent that is more accessible for processing than the ball (Bock and Warren, 1985)
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