How does syntactic alignment affect eye-movements?
Speaker: Helene Kreysa
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Abstract:
It has recently been suggested that production and comprehension access shared representations. Pickering & Garrod's (2004) interactive alignment model claims that representations at all levels are aligned by simple priming mechanisms, with activation of representations at one level boosting activation of representations at other, related, levels. One prediction of this model is that eye-movements reflecting linguistic processing could also become aligned between comprehension and production.
The experiment I will present examines how eye-movements during scene description are affected in a dialogue-type situation, where people alternate between comprehension and production. Speakers usually fixate an object about a second before naming it (Griffin & Bock, 2000), and they are faster to start describing a target picture when primed with a scene for which the same syntactic structure could be used (Smith & Wheeldon, 2001). Therefore, if priming percolates from one level of representation to another, then participants should fixate first-mentioned objects (e.g., patients) earlier if the syntactic structure of prime and target scenes is the same (e.g., both passives).
We investigated this claim using the confederate priming technique (Branigan, Pickering & Cleland, 2000): a confederate and a naive participant took turns describing black-and-white cartoon scenes to each other. Both interlocutors' utterances and the naive participant's eye-movements were recorded during both comprehension and production. In experimental trials, the confederate produced either an active or a passive prime sentence, such as [1, 2]. Then the naive participant described a different picture, e.g. of an artist tickling a cowboy.
[1] The doctor is tickling the policeman.
[2] The policeman is being tickled by the doctor.
There was a strong syntactic priming effect on the structure of target sentences: after hearing a passive prime, participants produced a passive construction themselves in about half the trials, whereas they almost never produced passives after active primes. This priming also affects fixation patterns: eye-movements during speech production are very closely locked to the syntactic structure of the upcoming sentence. However, the influence seems to be due entirely to the word order of the target sentence, the syntax of the prime sentence does not exert an independent influence.