Choice of Referring Expression Subject to Visual Context, Linguistic Context and Competition

Language production studies tend to investigate central tendencies, though there are extensive individual differences in any production task. Studying this variability in behavior can be revealing of the motivations and consequences of production choices. In a picture-description task, participants used either active object or passive relative clauses to describe animate or inanimate entities in pictures. Variability in productions was dependent on the animacy of the target noun, such that animate entities were described with almost exclusively passive relative clauses while inanimate entities were described with a combination of actives and passives. Further, visual properties of the scenes affected production choices such that less salient inanimate entities tended to be described with passive relative clauses. There were also substantial individual differences in structure choices for inanimate target nouns. Speakers with more variability in syntactic structure of their utterances exhibited markers of increased production difficulty in their inanimate vs. animate trails. Implications for theories of grammatical encoding are discussed.