Attention and Memory Play Different Roles in Syntactic Choice During Sentence Production

ABSTRACT

Attentional control of referential information is an important contributor to the structure of discourse. We investigated how attention and memory interplay during visually situated sentence production. We manipulated speakers’ attention to the agent or the patient of a described event by means of a referential or a dot visual cue. We also manipulated whether the cue was implicit or explicit by varying its duration (70 ms vs. 700 ms). Participants used passive voice more often when their attention was directed to the patient’s location, regardless of whether the cue duration. This effect was stronger when the cue was explicit rather than implicit, especially for passive-voice sentences. Analysis of sentence onset latencies showed a divergent pattern: Latencies were shorter (1) when the agent was cued, (2) when the cue was explicit, and (3) when the (explicit) cue was referential. (1) and (2) indicate facilitated sentence planning when the cue supports a canonical (active voice) sentence frame and when speakers had more time to plan their sentences, whereas (3) suggests that sentence planning was sensitive to whether the cue was informative with regard to the cued referent. We propose that differences between production likelihoods and production latencies indicate distinct contributions from attentional focus and memorial activation to sentence planning: Although the former partly predicts syntactic choice, the latter facilitates syntactic assembly (i.e., initiating overt sentence generation).

Funding

This work was supported by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100.”

Notes

¹ To analyze initial fixations on visually cued versus noncued referents, the pictures were precoded to include separate areas of interest: one for each referent (agent and patient) and one for the background. The referent areas included the referent itself plus a surrounding area of about two degrees of visual angle. Both Dot and Referent cueing manipulations were highly effective in attracting initial visual attention to the cued location.

² Simple effects were determined via dummy-coding of a reference predictor. For example, when Cue Location is dummy-coded as 1 = Agent, 0 = Patient, the resulting ‘main effect of Cue Duration’ in the model actually refers to the simple effect of Cue Duration given Cue Location = 0 (Patient).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100.”