Contributions of animacy to grammatical function assignment and word order during production

Branigan, Holly P.; Pickering, Martin J.; Tanaka, Mitsuya

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2007.02.003

Cited by 190 publications

(193 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…This would predict that defi nite embedded NPs might be available for articulation earlier than indefi nite embedded NPs. Availability -or, ease of production of upcoming material -is known to aff ect sentence planning (Bock & Warren, 1985 ;Branigan et al, 2008 ;Brown-Schmidt & Konopka, 2008 ;Ferreira, 1996 ;Ferreira & Dell, 2000 ;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000 ). For example, when upcoming material is not available for production, speakers are more likely to lengthen preceding words (Fox Tree & Clark, 1997 ) or insert additional words (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002 ), including optional function words, such as optional that in English complement or relative clauses (Ferreira & Dell, 2000 ;Roland et al, 2006 ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

Norcliffe

Jaeger

2014

Lang. cogn.

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a b st r a c t Recent proposals hold that the cognitive systems underlying language production exhibit computational properties that facilitate communicative effi ciency, i.e., an effi cient trade-off between production ease and robust information transmission. We contribute to the cross-linguistic evaluation of the communicative effi ciency hypothesis by investigating speakers' preferences in the production of a typologically rare head-marking alternation that occurs in relative clause constructions in Yucatec Maya. In a sentence recall study, we fi nd that speakers of Yucatec Maya prefer to use reduced forms of relative clause verbs when the relative clause is more contextually expected. This result is consistent with communicative effi ciency and thus supports its typological generalizability. We compare[ * ] We thank Serapio Canul Dzib for Yucatec Maya language consulting and for assistance in preparing, translating, and recording experimental stimuli; Marcelina Chan, Miguel Sosoya, José Cipriano Dzib Uitzil, and Lorena Pool Balam for transcribing the Yucatec data; Andrew Watts for programming assistance; and Juergen Bohnemeyer for sharing his knowledge of and insights into Yucatec grammar with us. We are also very grateful to Mtra. Leyla Gisela Leo Peraza and Ddra. Graciela Cortés Camarillo at the Universidad de Oriente (UNO), for their offi cial support of the project, and to Betsy Kraft and Marta Beatriz Poot Nahuat for their invaluable assistance with participant recruiting and administration. Finally, our thanks to all the students at the UNO who took part in our experiment. This work was partially funded through National Science Foundation grants BCS-0848353 and CAREER IIS-1150028 to TFJ. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily refl ect those of the National Science Foundation. Address for correspondence: Elisabeth Norcliff e, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. e-mail: elisabeth.norcliff e@mpi.nl nor cliffe and jaeger 168 two types of cue to the presence of a relative clause, pragmatic cues previously investigated in other languages and a highly predictive morphosyntactic cue specifi c to Yucatec. We fi nd that Yucatec speakers' preferences for a reduced verb form are primarily conditioned on the more informative cue. This demonstrates the role of both general principles of language production and their language-specifi c realizations.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

Norcliffe

Jaeger

2014

Lang. cogn.

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“…Specifically, we introduced the notion of conceptual guidance, i.e., guidance provided by non-linguistic properties of the referents being processed. The category of a referent to be visually searched (e.g., Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999;Zelinsky & Schmidt, 2009) or to be linguistically described (e.g., McDonald et al, 1993;Branigan et al, 2008) is already known to mediate visual and linguistic responses. In our study, we manipulated conceptual guidance by cuing descriptions of either animate or inanimate visual referents.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Evidence for this type of guidance comes primarily from visual search experiments, where semantic information about visual referents is used to optimize the allocation of visual attention (e.g., Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999;Findlay & Gilchrist, 2001;Henderson, 2003;Zelinsky & Schmidt, 2009;Nuthmann & Henderson, 2010;Hwang, Wang, & Pomplun, 2011). Since a central conceptual feature of referents is their animacy, (i.e., whether they are living things or not), already shown to impact grammatical assignment and word ordering (e.g., McDonald, Bock, & Kelly, 1993;Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000;Branigan, Pickering, & Tanaka, 2008;Coco & Keller, 2009) and expected to play a key role in sentence production (McDonald et al, 1993), in the current study, we manipulate animacy to investigate conceptual guidance effects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production

Coco

Keller

2014

Cogn Process

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Situated language production requires the integration of visual attention and linguistic processing. Previous work has not conclusively disentangled the role of perceptual scene information and structural sentence information in guiding visual attention. In this paper, we present an eye-tracking study that demonstrates that three types of guidance, perceptual, conceptual, and structural, interact to control visual attention. In a cued language production experiment, we manipulate perceptual (scene clutter) and conceptual guidance (cue animacy), and measure structural guidance (syntactic complexity of the utterance). Analysis of the time course of language production, before and during speech, reveals that all three forms of guidance affect the complexity of visual responses, quantified in terms of the entropy of attentional landscapes and the turbulence of scan patterns, especially during speech. We find that perceptual and conceptual guidance mediate the distribution of attention in the scene, whereas structural guidance closely relates to scan-pattern complexity. Furthermore, the eye-voice span of the cued object and its perceptual competitor are similar; its latency mediated by both perceptual and structural guidance. These results rule out a strict interpretation of structural guidance as the single dominant form of visual guidance in situated language production. Rather, the phase of the task and the associated demands of cross-modal cognitive processing determine the mechanisms that guide attention.

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“…The repeated pairings of events, words, and structures seen in the current studies are examples of Plan Reuse in this framework, where previously-uttered forms become easier as a function of implicit learning over past production and comprehension events (e.g., Chang, 2009). The preference to map animate patients to early sentence positions or prominent grammatical roles can be seen as emergent both from plan reuse (Montag & MacDonald, 2014) and also from efficient interleaving of execution and planning in an incremental production system, promoting early execution of easier plan components (Bock & Warren, 1985;Branigan, Pickering & Tanaka, 2008). On this view, learning over past experience serves to reduce production difficulty.…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Montag

Matsuki

Kim

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

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Cross-linguistic studies allow for analyses that would be impossible in a single language. To better understand the factors that underlie sentence production, we investigated production choices in main and relative clause production tasks in three languages: English, Japanese and Korean. The effects of both non-linguistic attributes (such as conceptual animacy) and language specific properties (such as word order) were investigated. Japanese and Korean are structurally similar to each other but different from English, which allowed for an investigation of the production consequences of non-linguistic attributes in different typological or word order contexts (when Japanese and Korean speakers make similar production choices that are unlike those of English speakers), as well as production choices that differ despite typological similarity (when Japanese and Korean speakers make different choices). Speakers of all three languages produced more passive utterances when describing animate entities, but the overall rate of passives varied by task and language. Further, the sets of items that were most likely to elicit passives varied by language, with Japanese and Korean speakers more likely to produce passives when patients were adversely affected by the depicted event. These results suggest a number of factors that contribute to language production choices across three languages, and how general cognitive constraints on sentence production may interact with the structure of a specific language.Keywords: Sentence production; relative clauses; passives; cross-linguistic analysis; Japanese; Korean An English speaker in a coffee shop, desiring coffee, might say, "A coffee," or "I'll take coffee, a small one, please," or "May I have a small?" Even in this highly constrained context, many different utterances can convey the speaker's message. This flexibility of language production, and speakers' abilities to navigate the high number of lexical and syntactic options to converge on a single utterance form, are central features of the production process and have become important topics of research. The research presented here addresses these issues by comparing production across three different languages and two different sentence constructions. This approach provides a detailed picture of how production flexibility-the availability of alternative syntactic and lexical options to convey a message-can vary across language and message, and how these factors shape speakers' implicit choices of words and sentence structures, providing insight into how language production processes settle on an utterance plan over alternative possibilities. Multiple Forces Shaping Production ChoicesLanguage production researchers have long recognized that the properties of both words and sentence structures affect producers' implicit utterance choices. Recently, several researchers have aimed to characterize a range of these effects by contrasting two means by which speakers converge on a single string of to-be-articulated words. Sentence const...

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Contributions of animacy to grammatical function assignment and word order during production

Cited by 190 publications

References 35 publications

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

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