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Category: Project

Description: This study investigates whether and how visual properties affect the description of transitive event scenes. Two factors are manipulated: character position (Agent situated left vs. Agent situated right) and character orientation (Agent and Patient facing each other vs. Agent and Patient looking in the same direction). Prior to the scene, the picture of the patient is presented for 700 ms in the same position and with the same orientation as in the upcoming scene to increase its prominence and thus the production of patient-initial utterances. While referential cueing has been shown to affect syntactic choice, it is less clear what effect visual properties may have. The analyses reported in the paper slightly differ from the planned analyses in the pre-registration. Instead of separate analyses of speech onset times for agent-initial and patient-initial utterances, all utterances were analysed together in one model as this turned out to be more reasonable during the review process.