Referent Cueing, Position, and Animacy as Accessibility Factors in Visually Situated Sentence Production

Abstract

Speakers' readiness to describe event scenes using active or passive constructions has previously been attributed-among other factors-to the accessibility of referents. While most research has highlighted the accessibility of agents, the present study examines whether patients' accessibility can be modulated by means of visual preview of the patient character (derived accessibility), as well as by manipulating the animacy status of patients (inherent accessibility). Crucially, we also examined whether effects of accessibility were amenable to the visuospatial position of the patient by presenting the patient character either to the left or to the right of the agent. German native speakers were asked to describe drawings depicting event scenes while their gaze and speech were recorded. Our results show that making patients more accessible using derived and inherent accessibility factors led to more produced passives, shorter speech onsets, and a reduction of fixations on patients. Complementing previous research on agent accessibility, our findings demonstrate that the accessibility of patients affected both sentence production and looking behavior. While effects were observed for both inherent and derived accessibility, they appeared to be more pronounced for the latter. Regarding character position, we observed a significant effect of position on participants' gaze patterns and structural choices, suggesting that position itself can be considered an accessibility-related factor. Importantly, the position of a patient also interacted with our manipulation of its accessibility via visual preview. Participants produced more passives after preview than no preview for left-positioned but not for right-positioned patients, demonstrating that effects of patient accessibility (i.e., visual preview) were susceptible to character position. A similar interaction was observed for participants' viewing patterns. These findings provide the first evidence that the position of a referent is a factor that interacts with other accessibility-related factors (i.e., cueing), emphasizing the need of controlling for position effects when testing referent accessibility.

Planning of active and passive voice in German

“…Although visual cueing was effective and directed our participants' gaze to the patient of an event scene, this manipulation of attention did not lead to a higher rate of non-canonical structures, confirming previous research that has found speakers of German to be disinclined to produce passives or OVS actives in event descriptions (Esaulova et al 2019(Esaulova et al , 2020. The aim of our study was to find out if this cross-linguistic difference in the propensity to produce noncanonical structures was related to morphological case marking.…”

(How) Visual properties affect the perception and description of transitive events

“…Averaged across cue positions (patient and agent), this resulted in an increase of around 5%. Similarly, Esaulova et al (2020) reported a significant increase of passives for patient-left relative to agentleft scenes of around 4% for German. Altogether, previous studies that took the position of the agent relative to the patient into account demonstrate that the position of agent and patient in transitive event scenes can affect the planning of a verbal description.…”

“…( Although all three structures are viable in German, previous production studies (Esaulova et al, 2019(Esaulova et al, , 2020Esaulova, Dolscheid, Reuters et al, 2021;Sauppe, 2017aSauppe, , 2017bSchlenter et al, 2022) have consistently shown that German speakers have a strong preference for canonical active SVO sentences when describing transitive event scenes. If they produce a non-canonical structure, German speakers produce passives rather than active OVS sentences (for more discussion, see Schlenter et al, 2022).…”

“…found that speakers needed more time to produce a one-sentence description for transitive event scenes with agents situated to the right of patients than for scenes with agents situated to the left of patients (see also Esaulova et al, 2019Esaulova et al, , 2020. Thus, a violation of the SAB resulted in longer sentence-onset latencies.…”

“…This indicates that a visual scene which does not conform to the mental linearization of events and, therefore, leads to a misalignment between visual event representation and a linguistically preferred structure (subject/agent-verb-object/patient) can affect the planning process and delay the initiation of the describing utterance. Moreover, in studies that made use of visual cueing of scene characters prior to scene onset and manipulated the position of agent and patient in the scene, speakers have been found to produce more patient-initial sentences (passives, patient-initial active sentences) when patients appeared in the left position (Esaulova et al, 2019(Esaulova et al, , 2020Pokhoday et al, 2019).…”