Abstract
How does non-linguistic, visual experience affect language production? A series of experiments addressed this question by examining linguistic and visual preferences for agent positions in transitive action scenarios. In Experiment 1, 30 native German speakers described event scenes where agents were positioned either to the right or to the left of patients. Produced utterances had longer speech onset times for scenes with right- rather than left-positioned agents, suggesting that the visual organization of events can affect sentence production. In Experiment 2 another cohort of 36 native German participants indicated their aesthetic preference for left- or right-positioned agents in mirrored scenes and displayed a preference for scenes with left-positioned agents. In Experiment 3, 37 Arabic native participants performed the same non-verbal task showing the reverse preference. Our findings demonstrate that non-linguistic visual preferences seem to affect sentence production, which in turn may rely on the writing system of a specific language.
Highlights
The intricate relationship between the visual world and its symbolic representation in language provides one of the prime examples for the interaction between linguistic and cognitive systems
While a number of studies have established that people have spatial preferences when they listen to transitive event descriptions, here we focus on language production: to what extent does the visuo-spatial position of a referent affect how speakers encode a scene and how they produce an utterance? To answer this question, we do focus on speakers’ syntactic choices and measure their speech onset times as a more direct indication of sentence planning
Unlike previous studies that exclusively focused on links between spatial representations and language comprehension, here we provide first evidence that visual preferences may affect language production
Summary
The intricate relationship between the visual world and its symbolic representation in language provides one of the prime examples for the interaction between linguistic and cognitive systems. That is, when the agent of a visual scene was partially occluded and perceptually less salient, speakers tended to start their utterances with the patient rather than with the agent, leading to a higher proportion of passive sentences (Rissman et al 2018). As these examples indicate, visual properties of a scene can affect sentence choice, supporting the notion of close links between vision and linguistic structure
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