Abstract:The relation between event apprehension and utterance formulation was examined in children and adults. English-speaking adults and 4-year-olds viewed motion events while their eye movements were monitored. Half of the participants in each age group described each event (Linguistic task), whereas the other half studied the events for an upcoming memory test (Nonlinguistic task). All participants then completed a memory test in which they identified changes to manners of motion and path endpoints in target event… Show more
“…Bunger et al . [18] presented cartoon films which included a rich visual context; however, the movement in these films will have increased the salience of the relevant features for description [61]. Figure 2.The left image ( a ) depicts a transitive event with minimal objects in the background.…”
Section: Eye-say: Investigating Language Production Processes In Typimentioning
Skilled sentence production involves distinct stages of message conceptualization (deciding what to talk about) and message formulation (deciding how to talk about it). Eye-movement paradigms provide a mechanism for observing how speakers accomplish these aspects of production in real time. These methods have recently been applied to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and specific language impairment (LI) in an effort to reveal qualitative differences between groups in sentence production processes. Findings support a multiple-deficit account in which language production is influenced not only by lexical and syntactic constraints, but also by variation in attention control, inhibition and social competence. Thus, children with ASD are especially vulnerable to atypical patterns of visual inspection and verbal utterance. The potential to influence attentional focus and prime appropriate language structures are considered as a mechanism for facilitating language adaptation and learning.
“…Bunger et al . [18] presented cartoon films which included a rich visual context; however, the movement in these films will have increased the salience of the relevant features for description [61]. Figure 2.The left image ( a ) depicts a transitive event with minimal objects in the background.…”
Section: Eye-say: Investigating Language Production Processes In Typimentioning
Skilled sentence production involves distinct stages of message conceptualization (deciding what to talk about) and message formulation (deciding how to talk about it). Eye-movement paradigms provide a mechanism for observing how speakers accomplish these aspects of production in real time. These methods have recently been applied to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and specific language impairment (LI) in an effort to reveal qualitative differences between groups in sentence production processes. Findings support a multiple-deficit account in which language production is influenced not only by lexical and syntactic constraints, but also by variation in attention control, inhibition and social competence. Thus, children with ASD are especially vulnerable to atypical patterns of visual inspection and verbal utterance. The potential to influence attentional focus and prime appropriate language structures are considered as a mechanism for facilitating language adaptation and learning.
“…Importantly, the overt attention directed to the manner and path of motion was identical across the two language groups during free-viewing of the same motion stimuli (see also Trueswell & Papafragou, 2010; cf. Bunger, Papafragou & Trueswell, 2012 for extensions of this work to English-speaking 4-year-olds). These results confirm and extend single-language demonstrations showing that, when planning speech, people very quickly direct their gaze to components of the scene that they plan to talk about, usually in the order that they plan to speak about them (Bock, Irwin, Davidson, & Levelt, 2003; Gleitman, January, Nappa, & Trueswell, 2007; Griffin & Bock, 2000; Griffin & Spieler, 2006).…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This is because it is important to establish the extent to which eyegaze patterns observed during event description reflect the task of language production as opposed to the underlying salience of event subcomponents (see Bunger et al, 2012; Papafragou et al, 2008). At present, there are very few studies of nonlinguistic event perception, and even fewer that compare multiple age and/or language groups (see Shipley & Zacks, 2008, for a review).…”
This study investigates the implications of language-specific constraints on linguistic event encoding for the description and on-line inspection of causative events. English-speaking and Greek-speaking adults, 3-year-olds, and 4-year-olds viewed and described causative events, which are composed of Means and Result subevents, in an eyetracking study. The results demonstrate cross-linguistic differences in the informational content of causative event descriptions: Greek speakers across age groups were more likely than English speakers to mention only one causative subevent. Developmental changes in the tendency to encode information about causative events in language were also evident: in both language groups, adults were more likely than children to mention both Means and Result subevents. Finally, for both adult and child speakers of both languages, preparing different types of event descriptions changed the way that events were visually inspected, shifting attention toward to-be-encoded subevents. These findings offer some of the first evidence about the development of the language production system, the attentional mechanisms that it employs, and its workings in speakers of different languages.
“…Although few studies of children's sentence production have used eye movement paradigms, existing research demonstrates the value of such methods in examining links between children's visual attention, speech planning, and referential production. Bunger, Trueswell, & Papafragou (2012) recorded four-year-olds' eye movements as they described motion events to ascertain whether children's linguistic omissions are due to attentional deficits (i.e. that children simply do not look at core aspects of a scene) or due to constraints stemming from the developing linguistic system itself.…”
Children's ability to refer is underpinned by their developing cognitive skills. Using a production task (n=57), we examined pre-articulatory visual fixations to contrast objects (e.g. to a large apple when the target was a small one) to investigate how visual scanning drives informativeness across development. Eye movements reveal that although four-year-olds fixate contrast objects to a similar extent as seven-year-olds and adults, this does not result in explicit referential informativeness. Instead, four-year-olds frequently omit distinguishing information from their referring expressions regardless of the comprehensiveness of their visual scan. In contrast, older children make greater use of information gleaned from their visual inspections, like adults. Thus, we find a barrier not to the INCIDENCE of contrast fixations by younger children, but to their USE of them in referential informativeness. We recommend that follow-up work investigates whether younger children's immature executive skills prevent them from describing referents in relation to contrast objects.
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