Linearisation during language production: evidence from scene meaning and saliency maps

ABSTRACT Speaking (1989) inspired research on topics such as word selection, syntactic formulation, and dialogue, but an issue that remains understudied is linearisation: the question of how speakers organise a series of utterances into a coherent sequence, allowing both speaker and listener to keep track of what has been said and what will come next. In this paper we describe a new line of research investigating linearisation during scene description tasks, and we argue that, as Pim Levelt suggested in 1981 and in the 1989 book, the need to linearise arises from attentional constraints in the language system. Our work shows that attentional, visual, and linguistic processes are flexibly coordinated during scene descriptions, and that speakers not only respond to what the eye sees, but also to what the mind anticipates finding in the visual world.