Transitive event scenes with feminine nouns:(1) fairy measuring witch, (2) horsewoman pushing nun, (3) female cook watering pixie, (4) witch pushing hairdresser, (5) nun watering queen, (6) pixie measuring bride, (7) bride hitting female doctor, (8) hairdresser filming grandmother, (9) queen weighing mermaid, (10) female doctor filming fairy, (11) grandmother weighing horsewoman, (12) mermaid hitting female cook Transitive event scenes with masculine nouns:(1) guitarist hitting tourist, (2) vampire hitting cowboy, (3) policeman weighing vampire, (4) clown filming woodsman, (5) woodsman weighing sailor, (6) tourist filming policeman, (7) fool measuring pirate, (8) sailor pushing sheriff, (9) cowboy watering prisoner, (10) pirate pushing clown, (11) sheriff watering fool, (12) prisoner measuring guitarist

No abstract

This review provides an update on what we know about differences in prediction in a first and second language after several years of extensive research. It shows when L1/L2 differences are most likely to occur and provides an explanation as to why they occur. For example, L2 speakers may capitalize more on semantic information for prediction than L1 speakers, or possibly they do not make predictions due to differences in the weighting of cues. A different weighting of cues can be the result of prior experience from the L1 and/or the prior experience in an experiment which affects L1 and L2 processing to a different extent. Overall, prediction in L2 processing often emerges later and/or is weaker than in L1 processing. Because L2 processing is generally slower, L1/L2 differences are likely to occur at certain levels of prediction, most notably at the form level, in line with a prediction-by-production mechanism.

In a series of aesthetic judgement tasks, we found that speakers of German display a spatial agency bias if, and only if, a scene shows an agent performing an action in the direction of a patient. The experiments reported here replicate and extend previous findings, indicating that the position of the agent relative to the patient affects how speakers perceive a depicted event. Moreover, the experiments are the first to show that the orientation of the agent and patient (toward vs. away from other event character) is another modulating factor affecting scene perception as well as scene description.

In a non-verbal aesthetic judgement task and a pre-registered production task, we tested how the orientation of the patient relative to the agent in a visual scene affects the perception and description of the depicted transitive event. Previous research has shown that a visual property like the position of the patient relative to the agent can affect speakers’ verbalization of events. Here, we investigated whether orientation constitutes another factor besides position that affects scene description. While speakers of German displayed an overall preference for scenes in which agent and patient faced each other, these scenes needed more time for sentence planning than the same scenes that showed the patient looking in the same direction and thus away from the agent. Moreover, we elicited more patient-initial sentences for face-to-face scenes than for same-direction scenes. The increase in patient-initial sentences was comparable to the increase in patient-initial sentences for scenes with left-positioned patients as compared to right-positioned patients. Based on our findings, we argue that manipulations of both position and orientation can change the prominence of the patient. The more prominent the patient (facing the agent, being placed to the left of the agent), the more likely speakers are to choose the patient as the sentence-initial subject. Hence, subtle changes of visual properties may affect not only how speakers perceive an event but also how they describe an event. Our findings are of relevance for a range of tasks that use visual materials.