Journal article
Speaking for seeing: Sentence structure guides visual event apprehension.
- Sauppe S Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Language Evolution, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Electronic address: sebastian.sauppe@uzh.ch.
- Flecken M Department of Linguistics, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands.
- 2020-11-24
Published in:
- Cognition. - 2020
English
Human experience and communication are centred on events, and event apprehension is a rapid process that draws on the visual perception and immediate categorization of event roles ("who does what to whom"). We demonstrate a role for syntactic structure in visual information uptake for event apprehension. An event structure foregrounding either the agent or patient was activated during speaking, transiently modulating the apprehension of subsequently viewed unrelated events. Speakers of Dutch described pictures with actives and passives (agent and patient foregrounding, respectively). First fixations on pictures of unrelated events that were briefly presented (for 300 ms) next were influenced by the active or passive structure of the previously produced sentence. Going beyond the study of how single words cue object perception, we show that sentence structure guides the viewpoint taken during rapid event apprehension.
- Language
-
- English
- Open access status
- hybrid
- Identifiers
-
- DOI 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104516
- PMID 33228969
- Persistent URL
- https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/195528
Statistics
Document views: 17
File downloads: