Visual Salience Modulates Structure Choice in Relative Clause Production

Visual salience modulates structure choice in relative clause production.

The role of visual salience on utterance form was investigated in a picture description study. Participants heard spoken questions about animate or inanimate entities in a picture and produced a relative clause in response. Visual properties of the scenes affected production choices such that less salient inanimate entities tended to yield longer initiation latencies and to be described with pa...

Relative clause attachment ambiguity resolution in Persian

The present study seeks to find the way Persian native speakers resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences containing a complex NP of the type NP of NP followed by a relative clause (RC). Previous off-line studies have found a preference for high attachment in the present study, an on-line technique was used to help identify the nature of this process. Persian speakers were pre...

Relative clause structure, relative clause perception, and the change from SOV to SVO.

This study presents a view of diachronic change in language, according to which one of the fundamental factors motivating syntactic change is to be found in the conflicting interaction of principles determining the language organization. Specifically, it will be argued that principles of structural nature and principles of perceptual nature are in conflict in languages of the SOV type, because ...

Distribution of Attention Modulates Salience Signals in Early Visual Cortex

Previous research has shown that the extent to which people spread attention across the visual field plays a crucial role in visual selection and the occurrence of bottom-up driven attentional capture. Consistent with previous findings, we show that when attention was diffusely distributed across the visual field while searching for a shape singleton, an irrelevant salient color singleton captu...

Production predicts comprehension: Animacy effects in Mandarin relative clause processing