Discourse Constraints on Syntactic Processing in Language Production: A Cross-Linguistic Study in English and Spanish

Prat-Sala, Mercè; Branigan, Holly P.

doi:10.1006/jmla.1999.2668

Cited by 181 publications

(189 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Evidence for this type of guidance comes primarily from visual search experiments, where semantic information about visual referents is used to optimize the allocation of visual attention (e.g., Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999;Findlay & Gilchrist, 2001;Henderson, 2003;Zelinsky & Schmidt, 2009;Nuthmann & Henderson, 2010;Hwang, Wang, & Pomplun, 2011). Since a central conceptual feature of referents is their animacy, (i.e., whether they are living things or not), already shown to impact grammatical assignment and word ordering (e.g., McDonald, Bock, & Kelly, 1993;Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000;Branigan, Pickering, & Tanaka, 2008;Coco & Keller, 2009) and expected to play a key role in sentence production (McDonald et al, 1993), in the current study, we manipulate animacy to investigate conceptual guidance effects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production

Coco

Keller

2014

Cogn Process

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Situated language production requires the integration of visual attention and linguistic processing. Previous work has not conclusively disentangled the role of perceptual scene information and structural sentence information in guiding visual attention. In this paper, we present an eye-tracking study that demonstrates that three types of guidance, perceptual, conceptual, and structural, interact to control visual attention. In a cued language production experiment, we manipulate perceptual (scene clutter) and conceptual guidance (cue animacy), and measure structural guidance (syntactic complexity of the utterance). Analysis of the time course of language production, before and during speech, reveals that all three forms of guidance affect the complexity of visual responses, quantified in terms of the entropy of attentional landscapes and the turbulence of scan patterns, especially during speech. We find that perceptual and conceptual guidance mediate the distribution of attention in the scene, whereas structural guidance closely relates to scan-pattern complexity. Furthermore, the eye-voice span of the cued object and its perceptual competitor are similar; its latency mediated by both perceptual and structural guidance. These results rule out a strict interpretation of structural guidance as the single dominant form of visual guidance in situated language production. Rather, the phase of the task and the associated demands of cross-modal cognitive processing determine the mechanisms that guide attention.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production

Coco

Keller

2014

Cogn Process

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“…Animacy is an inherent property of concepts, which also influences accessibility, as suggested by findings from other studies (e.g. Brunetti 2009, van Bergen 2011, Christianson and Ferreira 2005, Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000, Van Nice and Dietrich 2003. We investigate to what degree the interplay between animacy and definiteness can explain variation in subject placement in Dutch.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 74%

“…accessibility determined by the discourse context, are produced early in the sentence (e.g. Bock and Irwin 1980;Ferreira and Yoshita 2003;Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000). Conversely, entities marked by indefinite expressions are predicted to be dispreferred in the sentenceinitial position.…”

Section: Definiteness Of the Subjectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, it has been shown for a number of languages that there is an increase in passive structures in sentences with inanimate agents (e.g. McDonald et al 1993;Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000;Van Nice and Dietrich 2003). For Dutch, psycholinguistic experiments have shown that in constructions that have an inanimate subject, and in which there is another constituent that is higher in animacy, this other constituent is likely to occupy the sentence-initial position (e.g.…”

Section: Animacy Of the Subjectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, an entity's derived accessibility (i.e., its discourse prominence) may be a stronger competitor for the Subject First preference than its inherent accessibility (cf. Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000). Another question is whether effects of animacy and definiteness are absolute or relative to the properties of other entities (cf.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

Vogels

Bergen²

2017

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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Cross-linguistically, both subjects and topical information tend to be placed at the beginning of a sentence. Subjects are generally highly topical, causing both tendencies to converge on the same word order. However, subjects that lack prototypical topic properties may give rise to an incongruence between the preference to start a sentence with the subject and the preference to start a sentence with the most accessible information. We present a corpus study in which we investigate in what syntactic position (preverbal or postverbal) such low-accessible subjects are typically found in Dutch natural language. We examine the effects of both discourse accessibility (definiteness) and inherent accessibility (animacy). Our results show that definiteness and animacy interact in determining subject position in Dutch. Non-referential (bare) subjects are less likely to occur in preverbal position than definite subjects, and this tendency is reinforced when the subject is inanimate. This suggests that these two properties that make the subject less accessible together can 'gang up' against the subject first preference. The results support a probabilistic multifactorial account of syntactic variation.

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What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

Halicki

Suitner

Vogel

et al. 2021

Euro J Social Psych

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The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left-to-right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass, 2016). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence "Tom kicks George." tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left-hand side rather than on the righthand side. However, alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture-matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. For a test, we vary whether sentences are written in active versus passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right-hand side rather than on the left-hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted-upon person is positioned on the left-hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.

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Discourse Constraints on Syntactic Processing in Language Production: A Cross-Linguistic Study in English and Spanish

Cited by 181 publications

References 38 publications

Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production

Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production

Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

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