Visual Attention and Structural Choice in Sentence Production Across Languages

To represent the complexity of a visually perceived event, viewers need to attend selectively to different aspects of the event and its associated entities. Spoken descriptions of such complex events must encode the corresponding perceptual properties. This review discusses how the speaker’s attentional focus on one of the referents in a given event influences the structural choice in languages with different degrees of word order flexibility. First, we will discuss whether English speakers prefer to map visually salient referents onto a prominent grammatical role (e.g., Subject) or to a prominent linear position in the sentence (e.g., the sentential starting point). Comparison of this evidence with research in free word-order languages (Russian and Finnish) suggests the existence of a mapping mechanism wherein perceptual salience predominantly affects grammatical-role assignment and, to a lesser extent, assignment of linear positions.

[1]  Kathryn Bock,et al.  The effect of a pragmatic presupposition on syntactic structure in question answering , 1977 .

[2]  M. Posner,et al.  Images of mind , 1994 .

[3]  J. K. Bock,et al.  Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation , 1985, Cognition.

[4]  Mercè Prat-Sala,et al.  Discourse constraints on syntactic processing in language production , 2000 .

[5]  Charles E. Osgood,et al.  Salience and sentencing: Some production principles , 1977 .

[6]  Pamela A. Downing,et al.  Word order in discourse , 1995 .

[7]  M. Posner,et al.  Orienting of Attention* , 1980, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[8]  Peter Ford Dominey,et al.  Indeterminacy in language acquisition: the role of child directed speech and joint attention , 2004, Journal of Neurolinguistics.

[9]  Russell S. Tomlin,et al.  Focal attention, voice, and word order: an experimental, cross-linguistic study , 1995 .

[10]  W. Chafe.  Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view , 1976 .

[11]  Kathryn Bock,et al.  Syntactic effects of information availability in sentence production , 1980 .

[12]  B. Landau,et al.  “What” and “where” in spatial language and spatial cognition , 1993 .

[13]  Roger J. Wales,et al.  PASSIVES AND TOPICALIZATION , 1973 .

[14]  E. Kaiser,et al.  Invisible arguments: Effects of demotion in Estonian and Finnish , 2006 .

[15]  Heeju Hwang,et al.  The Effects of Lexical vs. Perceptual Primes on Sentence Production in Korean: An on-line investigation of event apprehension and sentence formulation , 2009 .

[16]  T. Givón,et al.  The grammar of referential coherence as mental processing instructions , 1992 .

[17]  Herbert H. Clark,et al.  On the process of comparing sentences against pictures , 1972 .

[18]  K. Bock,et al.  From conceptual roles to structural relations: bridging the syntactic cleft. , 1992 .

[19]  M. H. Kelly,et al.  Prototypicality in a Linguistic Context: Effects on Sentence Structure , 1986 .

[20]  Riitta Välimaa-Blum.  Compte-rendu de lecture de : « Maria Vilkuna : Free Word Order in Finnish: Its Syntax and Discourse Functions. Helsinki : Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, 1989. » , 1991 .

[21]  J. K. Bock.  Syntactic persistence in language production , 1986, Cognitive Psychology.

[22]  Bernard Comrie,et al.  The World's Major Languages , 1987 .

[23]  Kate Stewart,et al.  Starting points , 2020, SIGP.

[24]  Dare A. Baldwin,et al.  Understanding the link between joint attention and language. , 1995 .

[25]  L. Gleitman,et al.  On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation. , 2007, Journal of memory and language.

[26]  Sylvia Yuan,et al.  “Really? She Blicked the Baby?” , 2009, Psychological science.

[27]  David R. Olson,et al.  On the comprehension of active and passive sentences , 1972 .

[28]  M. Tanenhaus,et al.  Approaches to studying world-situated language use : bridging the language-as-product and language-as-action traditions , 2005 .

[29]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering , 2015 .

[30]  J. Mandler.  How to build a baby: II. Conceptual primitives. , 1992, Psychological review.

[31]  Olga T. Yokoyama,et al.  Discourse and word order , 1986 .

[32]  F. Ferreira,et al.  Conceptual accessibility and sentence production in a free word order language (Odawa) , 2005, Cognition.

[33]  E. Clark,et al.  Getting and maintaining attention in talk to young children* , 2007, Journal of Child Language.

[34]  Kathryn Bock,et al.  Putting first things first , 2004 .

[35]  Joan L. Prentice.  Effects of cuing actor vs cuing object on word order in sentence production , 1967 .

[36]  Russell S. Tomlin,et al.  Language and conceptualization: Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: the role of attention in grammar , 1997 .

[37]  Jennifer E. Arnold,et al.  The effect of additional characters on choice of referring expression: Everyone counts. , 2007, Journal of memory and language.

[38]  Susan Kemper,et al.  Effects of age, animacy and activation order on sentence production , 2006 .

[39]  David Poeppel,et al.  Analysis by Synthesis: A (Re-)Emerging Program of Research for Language and Vision , 2010, Biolinguistics.

[40]  J. Trueswell,et al.  The role of discourse context in the processing of a flexible word-order language , 2004, Cognition.

[41]  R. Rommetveit,et al.  Focus of attention in recall of active and passive sentences , 1968 .

[42]  Maria Vilkuna,et al.  Free word order in Finnish , 1989 .

[43]  Sudha Arunachalam,et al.  Meaning from syntax: Evidence from 2-year-olds , 2010, Cognition.

[44]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. , 1998, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[45]  Jan Svartvik.  On voice in the English verb , 1985 .