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PERCEPTION AND STRUCTURE IN SENTENCE PRODUCTION

Andriy Myachykov & Simon Garrod. PERCEPTION AND STRUCTURE IN SENTENCE PRODUCTION. General problem. How is perceptual processing (e.g. attention) related to structural processing (e.g. word order) during sentence production? Does salience matter when speakers decide

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PERCEPTION AND STRUCTURE IN SENTENCE PRODUCTION

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  1. Andriy Myachykov & Simon Garrod PERCEPTION AND STRUCTURE IN SENTENCE PRODUCTION

  2. General problem How is perceptual processing (e.g. attention) related to structural processing(e.g. word order) during sentence production? Does salience matter when speakers decide • how to order the referents in a sentence? and/or • which grammatical roles to assign?

  3. Structural questionDoes structural choice vary as function of perceptual priming?

  4. Background Carroll (1958) Speakers are more likely to provide an active voice answer if the question is about the agent(actor) Prentice (1967) Speakers learn active-voice sentences faster if the salient referent is the agent Tannenbaum & Williams 1968 An agent-laden preamble facilitates active voice descriptions of a novel picture Turner& Rommetveit 1968 Speaker’s focus of attention during storing and retrieving sentences influences the voice, in which the sentences are recalled Speaker’s attention to the top of the display facilitates verification of abovevs. below in locative sentences Clark & Chase 1972 Prior exposure to the patient of a transitive event facilitates verification of the passive voice description of the event Olson and Filby 1972

  5. Salient (prominent) referents assume prominent positions in a sentence

  6. Perceptual priming. Explicit (Tomlin, 1995) 100% of Agent-Cued – Active Voice The (red) fish ate the (blue) fish 100% of Patient-Cued – Passive Voice The (blue) fish was eaten by the (red) fish Speakers promote visually salient referents to the Subject role (Tomlin 1995, Forrest 1997, Gleitman et al 2007)

  7. What’s fishy about Fish Film 1. No independent manipulation of attention 2. No control of lexical or syntactic priming 3. No filler materials 4. Same event used 32 times. Routinization

  8. What’s wrong with the theory? • Positional (word order) hypothesis (first-in/first-out or see-say hypothesis) • Prominent Role-Assignment hypothesis (e.g. Subject ) In English, these two effects are difficult to tease apart But… One could use languages that are • subject-final (e.g., Malagasy) • permit both Voice and word order alternations (e.g., Russian or Finnish) We took the second approach

  9. All things equal: Russian Fish Film(just like Tomlin (1995) Free word order (all scrambling permutations grammatical) Canonical WO - SVO, Voice alternation possible Explicit case marking on nouns (almost always)

  10. word order type of trial word order type of trial Active voice SVO, SOV (SF) Active voice (AV) Passive voice OVS, OSV (OF) Passive voice (PV) word order type of trial Agent-first (SVO, SOV) (AF) Patient-first (OVS, OSV, PV) (PF) Agent-cued (AC) 16 0 Agent-cued (AC) Agent-cued (AC) 16 16 0 0 Patient-cued (PC) 16 0 Patient-cued (PC) Patient-cued (PC) 0 0 16 16 Study 1. Hypotheses positional grammatical role assignment Ferreira (1997) – wider structural inventory facilitates production (English) Case marking may interfere with Ferreira’s effect because early commitment to case-marked forms makes switching between them difficult

  11. Study 1. Word order Major effect of cue on the choice of word orderbut definitely not as strong as in Tomlin’s study Driven by scrambling (word order) not Voice (Subject assignment)

  12. Study 2. Reaction times agent-initial/agent-cued faster than agent-initial/patient-cued (182 msec) patient-initial/patient-cued faster than agent-initial/patient-cued (101 msec) agent-initial/agent-cued faster than patient-initial/patient-cued (82 msec)

  13. Study 2. Reaction times continued S(Pr)-initial/agent-cued faster than O(Pr)-initial/patient-cued (113 msec)

  14. What if cueing is more subtle? (Gleitman et al 2007) Voice (Active/Passive) Perspective (chase/flee) CNPs (A and B/ B and A) Symmetrical predicates (A meets B/ B meets A) Cueing effect of about 10% regardless of the target structure

  15. Study 2. Finnish(just like Gleitman et al)  LYÖDÄ fixation verb  fixation gaze-contingent cue 65 msec  scene 7000 fixation Perceptual priming - implicit: agent or patient

  16. Study 2. Word order No effect of cue

  17. Structural component. Discussion Focus of attention influences the choice of the starting point (word order) but not the grammatical role assignment Strong tendency to use canonical constructions Freedom of choice doesn’t always make life easier (cf. Ferreira, 1997)

  18. Perceptual questionHow visual scanning is related to production patterns? ??? Limited report (but I have more…)

  19. Measurement logic PERCEPTUAL/CONCEPTUAL (rapid apprehension) LEMMA (lemma selection) OVERT GENERATION (from lexical retrieval to phonological encoding) STRUCTURAL CHOICE t i m e FIRST FIXATIONS EYE-VOICE SPANS NAME ONSET LATENCIES EYE-VOICE SPAN –The interval between the offset of the last fixation to the referent relative to producing its name and the onset of the corresponding name

  20. “Boxer is punching a cowboy”  fixation time-out 7700 msec self-paced Study 3.Free description(English & Russian)

  21. Study 3. Word order In both languages canonical active voice SVO was predominantly used

  22. Study 3. English vs Russian Eye-Voice Spans reliable effect of language on - subject - verbno effect of language on - object

  23. Study 4. English like Fish Film only better  PUNCH fixation verb  fixation gaze-contingent cue 700  scene 7000 fixation priming - perceptual, agent or patientconstraint - only look at agent or patient

  24. Study 4. Word order

  25. Study 4. Eye-Voice Spans More difficulties associated with processing of Object-related referents

  26. Study 2. Finnish(we have already seen cueing did not work)  LYÖDÄ fixation verb  fixation gaze-contingent cue 70/700  scene 7000 fixation Perceptual priming - agent or patient

  27. Study 2. Finnish. EVS Eye-voice spans More difficulties associated with processing of Subject-related referents Like in Russian

  28. Conclusions. Structural Do perceptual factors bias the choice of word order? They do but… Not alone. Perceptual effects are quite weak. Additional biasing factors (visual constraints, other priming factors, discourse environment are necessary) Not directly. They probably affect perspective at the message level, but their influence decays quickly under the pressure of linguistic processing Not equally for all languages. Perceptual effects are more likely to prevail when the language grammar permits it Eye-voice spans. reveal how grammatical flexibility (cf. Ferreira 1996) is different from processing flexibility. Case marking leads to early structural commitments as revealed by OVS data

  29. Acknowledgements • Kambiz Tavabi Cambridge University • Holly Branigan University of Edinburgh • Fernanda Ferreira • Christoph Scheepers University of Glasgow • Jukka Hyona University of Turku • Seppo Vainio • Mike Posner University of Oregon • Russ Tomlin • Andrej Kibrik Moscow State University • Mira Bergelson • Victor Shklovsky

  30. Thank you!

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