2018 Sat Poster 6477b

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Catching Your Eye: Low-level perceptual cues influence preschoolers’ sentence formulation
L. Lindsay, H. Branigan, H. Rabagliati

When formulating a simple utterance, such as “the cat and the dog,” adults tend to look at the referents they are describing in the order of mention (e.g. Griffin & Bock, 2000), suggesting that their utterance planning is incremental (i.e. planned in small chunks).

However, speakers must make a choice about their ‘starting point’ (MacWhinney, 1977), i.e., between talking about the cat or the dog first. In adults, the starting point can be influenced by both linguistic and non-linguistic factors, such as the speaker’s visual attention (Gleitman et al., 2007). Is the same true for children?

In two eyetracking experiments, we investigated whether 3-4 year olds’ referential productions were similarly influenced by low-level perceptual cues. To do this, we tracked participants’ eye movements as they named two pictures, one of which was preceded by a subliminal cue that was presented on-screen for 75 ms before the picture onset. In Exp 1, 3- 4 year-olds (N=30) and adults (N=30) produced NP conjunctions (e.g. the cat and the dog). In Exp 2 (N=30 3-4 year-olds; 30 adults), participants produced complete sentences expressing the location of the objects (e.g. the cat is next to the dog), thus requiring participants to determine grammatical relations and generate a more complex constituent structure.

In Exp 1, we found that the cue influenced children’s first fixations (those within the first 500ms of picture onset; Fig 1). Critically, the cue influenced children’s order of mention: When the cue appeared on the left, children were more likely to name the left picture first than the right picture (.65 vs .42, p<.001); when the cue appeared on the right, they were more likely to name the right picture first than the left picture. Furthermore, children fixated the referents in the order that they mentioned them. These results suggest that children’s utterance planning for very simple utterances is incremental, like adults (Fig 2). Adults showed an overwhelming bias to fixate the left object first, but also a non-significant tendency for cue location to affect order of mention. Preliminary analysis of Exp 2 shows the same pattern: Cue location affected children’s initial fixations and order of mention.

Overall, this suggests that, in an impoverished task whereby children produce constrained utterances with minimal semantics, children formulate their utterances incrementally, as adults do; moreover, their choice of ‘starting point’, including choice of sentence subject, can be influenced by low-level perceptual cues.

References

Gleitman, L. R., January, D., Nappa, R., & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation. Journal of memory and language, 57(4), 544- 569.

Griffin, Z. M., & Bock, K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychological science, 11(4), 274-279.

MacWhinney, B. (1977). Starting points. Language, 152-168.