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Visual salience effects on speaker choices: Direct or indirect influences on linguistic processing?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

INÉS ANTÓN-MÉNDEZ
INÉS ANTÓN-MÉNDEZ*
Affiliation:
University of New England, Australia
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Inés Antón-Méndez, Linguistics (E11), University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales 2351, Australia. E-mail: iantonm2@une.edu.au
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Abstract

The effect of visual salience on speakers’ choices is investigated by contrasting the effects of both visual and linguistic manipulations on picture descriptions and eye movements. Two-character pictures were used, which can be described in one of two complementary ways (e.g., a cop chasing a robber can be described either from a chasing or from a fleeing perspective), and using simple actives or other alternative syntactic structures (e.g., “a robber is being chased by a cop”). The pictures were preceded by a verb priming one of the two perspectives and/or a preview of one of the two characters. The results show that the visual manipulation affects looks to the characters regardless of which perspective had been linguistically primed, but it only affects verbal descriptions in the absence of a linguistic prime. Linguistically priming one of the perspectives, in contrast, has a reliable effect on both looks to the characters and verbal descriptions. These results suggest that visual salience does not influence linguistic choices directly.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 601 - 631
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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