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Referent Cueing, Position, and Animacy as Accessibility Factors in Visually Situated Sentence Production
Yulia Esaulova1, Martina Penke1, Sarah Dolscheid1
1Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Frontiers in Psychology
|October 5, 2020
Summary
Patient accessibility, influenced by visual cues and inherent factors, impacts sentence construction and gaze behavior. Spatial position significantly interacts with these accessibility effects, highlighting its importance in linguistic research.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Referent accessibility influences sentence production, particularly active vs. passive voice.
- Prior research focused on agent accessibility, with less attention to patient accessibility.
- The role of visual preview and animacy in patient accessibility remains underexplored.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how patient accessibility, modulated by visual preview and animacy, affects sentence production and eye movements.
- To examine the influence of patient visuospatial position on accessibility effects.
- To determine if patient position interacts with accessibility manipulations.
Main Methods:
- German native speakers described event scenes from drawings.
- Gaze behavior and speech production were recorded simultaneously.
- Patient accessibility was manipulated via visual preview (derived accessibility) and animacy (inherent accessibility).
- Patient visuospatial position (left vs. right of agent) was varied.
Main Results:
- Increased patient accessibility (derived and inherent) led to more passive constructions, faster speech onset, and fewer fixations on patients.
- Patient position significantly affected gaze patterns and structural choices.
- Patient position interacted with visual preview, with preview effects on passives only observed for left-positioned patients.
- Viewing patterns also showed an interaction between position and preview.
Conclusions:
- Patient accessibility is a crucial factor influencing both sentence production and visual attention.
- Visuospatial position acts as an independent accessibility factor and modulates other accessibility manipulations.
- Future research on referent accessibility must control for positional effects.
Keywords:
accessibilityanimacycueingeye trackingleft-to-right preferencessentence productionstructural choicesMore Related Videos
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