{"id":4682,"date":"2018-11-02T15:12:49","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T19:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/?page_id=4682"},"modified":"2018-11-02T15:12:49","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T19:12:49","slug":"2018-sat-poster-6477b","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/program\/browse-abstracts-2018\/2018-sat-poster-6477b\/","title":{"rendered":"2018 Sat Poster 6477b"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saturday, November 3, 2018 |\u00a0<\/span>Poster Session II, Metcalf Small<\/a>\u00a0| 3:15pm<\/span><\/p>\n

Catching Your Eye: Low-level perceptual cues influence preschoolers’ sentence formulation<\/strong>
\nL. Lindsay, H. Branigan, H. Rabagliati<\/em><\/p>\n

When formulating a simple utterance, such as \u201cthe cat and the dog,\u201d <\/em>adults tend to look at the referents they are describing in the order of mention (e.g. Griffin & Bock, 2000), suggesting that their utterance planning is incremental (i.e. planned in small chunks).<\/p>\n

However, speakers must make a choice about their \u2018starting point\u2019 (MacWhinney, 1977), i.e., between talking about the cat <\/em>or the dog <\/em>first. In adults, the starting point can be influenced by both linguistic and non-linguistic factors, such as the speaker\u2019s visual attention (Gleitman et al., 2007). Is the same true for children?<\/p>\n

In two eyetracking experiments, we investigated whether 3-4 year olds\u2019 referential productions were similarly influenced by low-level perceptual cues. To do this, we tracked participants\u2019 eye movements as they named two pictures, one of which was preceded by a subliminal cue that was presented on-screen for 75 ms before the picture onset. In Exp 1, 3- 4 year-olds (N=30) and adults (N=30) produced NP conjunctions (e.g. the cat and the dog)<\/em>. In Exp 2 (N=30 3-4 year-olds; 30 adults), participants produced complete sentences expressing the location of the objects (e.g. the cat is next to the dog), <\/em>thus requiring participants to determine grammatical relations and generate a more complex constituent structure.<\/p>\n

In Exp 1, we found that the cue influenced children\u2019s first fixations (those within the first 500ms of picture onset; Fig 1). Critically, the cue influenced children\u2019s order of mention: When the cue appeared on the left, children were more likely to name the left picture first than the right picture (.65 vs .42, p<\/em><.001); when the cue appeared on the right, they were more likely to name the right picture first than the left picture. Furthermore, children fixated the referents in the order that they mentioned them. These results suggest that children\u2019s utterance planning for very simple utterances is incremental, like adults (Fig 2). Adults showed an overwhelming bias to fixate the left object first, but also a non-significant tendency for cue location to affect order of mention. Preliminary analysis of Exp 2 shows the same pattern: Cue location affected children\u2019s initial fixations and order of mention.<\/p>\n

Overall, this suggests that, in an impoverished task whereby children produce constrained utterances with minimal semantics, children formulate their utterances incrementally, as adults do; moreover, their choice of \u2018starting point\u2019, including choice of sentence subject, can be influenced by low-level perceptual cues.<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Gleitman, L. R., January, D., Nappa, R., & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation. Journal of memory and language<\/em>, 57<\/em>(4), 544- 569.<\/p>\n

Griffin, Z. M., & Bock, K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychological science<\/em>, 11<\/em>(4), 274-279.<\/p>\n

MacWhinney, B. (1977). Starting points. Language<\/em>, 152-168.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saturday, November 3, 2018 |\u00a0Poster Session II, Metcalf Small\u00a0| 3:15pm Catching Your Eye: Low-level perceptual cues influence preschoolers’ sentence formulation L. Lindsay, H. Branigan, H. Rabagliati When formulating a simple utterance, such as \u201cthe cat and the dog,\u201d adults tend to look at the referents they are describing in the order of mention (e.g. Griffin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15277,"featured_media":0,"parent":4058,"menu_order":25,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15277"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4683,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4682\/revisions\/4683"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bucld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}