Word and World Order: Semantic, Phonological, and Metrical Determinants of Serial Position

McDonald, Janet L.; Bock, Kathryn; Kelly, Michael H.

doi:10.1006/cogp.1993.1005

Cited by 263 publications

(286 citation statements)

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“…To our knowledge, these are the first demonstrations of such effects in Japanese and Korean production (see Hsiao & MacDonald, 2016, for similar results in Mandarin). Together, these results support a strong link between animacy and grammatical role assignment, beyond any effects on linear order (Christianson & F. Ferreira, 2005;McDonald, Bock & Kelly, 1993;Tanaka et al, 2011). On this view, speakers implicitly assign some element of their message as the topic, then follow language-specific constraints for an utterance about a topic or focused entity.…”

Section: Implications For Conceptual Accessibilitymentioning

confidence: 59%

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Montag

Matsuki

Kim

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

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Cross-linguistic studies allow for analyses that would be impossible in a single language. To better understand the factors that underlie sentence production, we investigated production choices in main and relative clause production tasks in three languages: English, Japanese and Korean. The effects of both non-linguistic attributes (such as conceptual animacy) and language specific properties (such as word order) were investigated. Japanese and Korean are structurally similar to each other but different from English, which allowed for an investigation of the production consequences of non-linguistic attributes in different typological or word order contexts (when Japanese and Korean speakers make similar production choices that are unlike those of English speakers), as well as production choices that differ despite typological similarity (when Japanese and Korean speakers make different choices). Speakers of all three languages produced more passive utterances when describing animate entities, but the overall rate of passives varied by task and language. Further, the sets of items that were most likely to elicit passives varied by language, with Japanese and Korean speakers more likely to produce passives when patients were adversely affected by the depicted event. These results suggest a number of factors that contribute to language production choices across three languages, and how general cognitive constraints on sentence production may interact with the structure of a specific language.Keywords: Sentence production; relative clauses; passives; cross-linguistic analysis; Japanese; Korean An English speaker in a coffee shop, desiring coffee, might say, "A coffee," or "I'll take coffee, a small one, please," or "May I have a small?" Even in this highly constrained context, many different utterances can convey the speaker's message. This flexibility of language production, and speakers' abilities to navigate the high number of lexical and syntactic options to converge on a single utterance form, are central features of the production process and have become important topics of research. The research presented here addresses these issues by comparing production across three different languages and two different sentence constructions. This approach provides a detailed picture of how production flexibility-the availability of alternative syntactic and lexical options to convey a message-can vary across language and message, and how these factors shape speakers' implicit choices of words and sentence structures, providing insight into how language production processes settle on an utterance plan over alternative possibilities. Multiple Forces Shaping Production ChoicesLanguage production researchers have long recognized that the properties of both words and sentence structures affect producers' implicit utterance choices. Recently, several researchers have aimed to characterize a range of these effects by contrasting two means by which speakers converge on a single string of to-be-articulated words. Sentence const...

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Section: Implications For Conceptual Accessibilitymentioning

confidence: 59%

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Montag

Matsuki

Kim

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

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“…Specifically, we introduced the notion of conceptual guidance, i.e., guidance provided by non-linguistic properties of the referents being processed. The category of a referent to be visually searched (e.g., Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999;Zelinsky & Schmidt, 2009) or to be linguistically described (e.g., McDonald et al, 1993;Branigan et al, 2008) is already known to mediate visual and linguistic responses. In our study, we manipulated conceptual guidance by cuing descriptions of either animate or inanimate visual referents.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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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“…One of these dimensions is linear word order: a significant complication in interpreting accessibility effects like the ones described by Gleitman et al (2007) for English is that the first-mentioned element in the sentence also happens to be the subject of the sentence. Thus in subject-initial languages like English, it is difficult to tease apart whether accessibility influences linear word order directly or whether it influences subject assignment (Bock and Warren 1985;McDonald et al 1993), and only indirectly word order. A strong or 'radical' version of linear incrementality (Gleitman et al 2007) would hold that accessibility directly drives lexical encoding and that early formulation involves little grammatical encoding (assignment of grammatical functions); on this view, subject assignment follows from whichever element is lexically retrieved first.…”

Section: Incremental Sentence Formulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vision and Language in Cross-Linguistic Research on Sentence Production

Norcliffe

2015

Attention and Vision in Language Processing

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Word and World Order: Semantic, Phonological, and Metrical Determinants of Serial Position

Cited by 263 publications

References 0 publications

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production

Vision and Language in Cross-Linguistic Research on Sentence Production

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