Attention and syntax in sentence production: A critical review

Abstract

Abstract:People often speak about visually perceived events that unfold in real time. In doing so speakers regularly translate the details of the visual world they describe onto the grammatical properties of the sentences about it. For example, the speaker needs to map her constantly changing attentional state onto the syntactic plan of the produced sentences. The present paper briefly discusses what attention is, explores methods for the co-activation of attentional and syntactic operations during the production of visually-mediated sentences in languages with different syntactic properties, and reviews the evidence for a regular link between the speaker's choice of sentential structure and the distribution of the speaker's attention to the event's referents. Also, it discusses evidence for interactive properties of attentional and other types of priming on the speaker's syntactic choice. Based on reviewed literature, we conclude that attention plays a crucial role in directing lexical and grammatical choices in human discourse. At the same time, the organization of the language's grammar reciprocates this influence by constraining the extent to which the distribution of attention can affect the real-time syntactic choices. Finally, we discuss how attentional priming engages in complex interactions with other priming effects: it interacts with lexical priming but not with syntactic priming, supporting an encapsulated view of sentence formulation. Keywords:attention, syntax, word order, sentence production Résumé:On parle souvent des événements alors qu'on est en train de les percevoir visuellement. Les locuteurs doivent alors projeter les détails du monde visuel qu'ils sont en train de décrire sur les propriétés grammaticales des phrases qui le décrivent. . Ainsi, le locuteur doit répercuter les changements constants de son état attentionnel sur la structure syntaxique des phrases qu'il produit. Le présent article discute brièvement de ce qu'est l'attention, puis présente les méthodes pour observer la coactivation des opérations attentionnelles et syntaxiques lors de la production de phrases résultant d'explorations visuelles, dans des langues ayant des propriétés syntaxiques différentes. Nous passons ensuite en revue les arguments en faveur d'un lien entre le choix du locuteur quant à la structure de la phrase et le partage de son attention sur les référents de l'événement. Nous discutons également des données mettant en évidence les propriétés interactives de l'amorçage attentionnel et d'autres types d'amorçage sur les choix syntaxiques du locuteur. Sur la base de la littérature, nous concluons que l'attention joue un rôle fondamental dans les choix lexicaux et grammaticaux du locuteur, tandis que la grammaire de chaque langue détermine, à son tour, dans quelle mesure la distribution de l'attention peut affecter les choix syntaxiques en temps réel. Enfin, nous exposons comment l'amorçage attentionnel interagit avec d'autres effets d'amorçage : il interagit avec l'amorçage lexical mais pas avec l'amorçage synt...

The Cross‐linguistic Study of Sentence Production

“…Ferreira 1994; Prat‐Sala and Branigan 2000; van Nice and Dietrich 2003; Kempen and Harbusch 2004; Rosenbach 2005; Bresnan et al 2007; Dennison 2008) and contextually conditioned properties (accessibility increases with previous mention of the same referent, MacWhinney and Bates 1978; Bock and Irwin 1980; V. S. Ferreira and Yoshita 2003; Prat‐Sala and Branigan 2000; Bresnan et al. 2007; semantic similarity to recently mentioned words, Bock 1986b; Igoa 1996; visual salience , Gleitman et al 2007; Myachykov 2007; Myachykov, Garrod, and Scheepers, forthcoming; Myachykov, Posner, and Tomlin 2007). Production researchers have been interested in conceptual accessibility, because it affects speakers’ word order choices, for example, in active vs. passive voice ( Lightning struck the church vs.…”

Priming sentence planning

“…One long-standing, attractive hypothesis in the field is that differences in phrasal syntax across languages may support different patterns of incremental planning by requiring speakers to encode some types of information before others. Cross-linguistic studies therefore provide unique insight into possible effects of linguistic structure on early sentence formulation and can help to identify limits in the flexibility of production processes (Brown-Schmidt & Konopka, 2008;Christianson & Ferreira, 2005;Myachykov, Garrod, & Scheepers, 2009;Norcliffe, Konopka, Brown, & Levinson, 2013;Sauppe, Norcliffe, Konopka, van Valin, & Levinson, 2013). …”

Voices

“…Closer examination of these findings revealed that syntactic network measures were mostly associated with the domains of executive functioning, attention, and information processing speed. These results corroborate emerging literature showing a relationship between syntax and executive functioning (White, Alexander, and Greenfield 2017), attention (Myachykov, Garrod, and Scheepers 2009), and information processing speed (Fernald, Perfors, and Marchman 2006). In SSD, syntactic anomalies might occur at any phase of the grammatical encoding process due to processing speed impairment (Knowles, David, and Reichenberg 2010), reduced inhibitory attentional control (Galaverna, Morra, and Bueno 2012), and/or planning impairments (Holt et al 2013).…”