Two experiments are reported which examine how manipulations of visual attention affect speakers' linguistic choices regarding word order, verb use and syntactic structure when describing simple pictured scenes. Experiment 1 presented participants with scenes designed to elicit the use of a perspective predicate (The man chases the dog/The dog flees from the man) or a conjoined noun phrase sentential Subject (A cat and a dog/A dog and a cat). Gaze was directed to a particular scene character by way of an attention-capture manipulation. Attention capture increased the likelihood that this character would be the sentential Subject and altered the choice of perspective verb or word order within conjoined NP Subjects accordingly. Experiment 2 extended these results to word order choice within Active versus Passive structures (The girl is kicking the boy/The boy is being kicked by the girl) and symmetrical predicates (The girl is meeting the boy/The boy is meeting the girl). Experiment 2 also found that early endogenous shifts in attention influence word order choices. These findings indicate a reliable relationship between initial looking patterns and speaking patterns, reflecting considerable parallelism between the on-line apprehension of events and the on-line construction of descriptive utterances.

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In many contexts, pronouns are interpreted as referring to the character mentioned first in the previous sentence, an effect called the ‘first-mention bias’. While adults can rapidly use the first-mention bias to guide pronoun interpretation, it is unclear when this bias emerges during development. Curiously, experiments with children between two and three years old show successful use of order of mention, while experiments with older children (four to five years old) do not. While this could suggest U-shaped development, it could also reflect differences in the methodologies employed. We show that children can indeed use first-mention information, but do so too slowly to have been detected in previous work reporting null results. Comparison across the present and previously published studies suggests that the speed at which children deploy first-mention information increases greatly during the preschool years.

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Speaker eye gaze and gesture are known to help child and adult listeners establish communicative alignment and learn object labels. Here we consider how learners use these cues, along with linguistic information, to acquire abstract relational verbs. Test items were perspective verb pairs (e.g., chase/flee, win/lose), which pose a special problem for observational accounts of word learning because their situational contexts overlap very closely; the learner must infer the speaker's chosen perspective on the event. Two cues to the speaker's perspective on a depicted event were compared and combined: (a) the speaker's eye gaze to an event participant (e.g., looking at the Chaser vs. looking at the Flee-er) and (b) the speaker's linguistic choice of which event participant occupies Subject position in his utterance. Participants (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) were eye-tracked as they watched a series of videos of a man describing drawings of perspective events (e.g., a rabbit chasing an elephant). The speaker looked at one of the two characters and then uttered either an utterance that was referentially uninformative (He's mooping him) or informative (The rabbit's mooping the elephant/The elephant's mooping the rabbit) because of the syntactic positioning of the nouns. Eye-tracking results showed that all participants regardless of age followed the speaker's gaze in both uninformative and informative contexts. However, verbmeaning choices were responsive to speaker's gaze direction only in the linguistically uninformative condition. In the presence of a linguistically informative context, effects of speaker gaze on meaning were minimal for the youngest children to nonexistent for the older populations. Thus children, like adults, can use multiple cues to inform verb-meaning choice but rapidly learn that the syntactic positioning of referring expressions is an especially informative source of evidence for these decisions.As a general consequence of the relational semantics they express, verbs serve as the linchpins for the combinatory meaning of sentences (e.g., Carlson & Tanenhaus, 1988;Grimshaw, 2005;Jackendoff, 2002). The successful comprehension of sentences typically hinges upon having detailed knowledge of a verb's syntactic and semantic preferences, such that both sorts of information are utilized to guide parsing and interpretation by adults (Altmann & Kamide, 1999;MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994;Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995) and by children (e.g., Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999;Snedeker & Trueswell, 2004).In keeping with their eventual role in mature language use, the discovery procedures for verb meanings must coordinate information from the world to which the verbs refer, their distribution with respect to referring expressions, and their syntactic environments (Gleitman, 1990;Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005;Fisher, 1996). Moreover, other nonlinguistic sources of evidence might also be considered, including Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Corresponde...