Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation.
Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2018 Apr 16;13(4):e0195547. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195547. eCollection 2018.
Understanding the determinants of syntactic choice in sentence production is a salient topic in psycholinguistics. Existing evidence suggests that syntactic choice results from an interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic factors, and a speaker's attention to the elements of a described event represents one such factor. Whereas multimodal accounts of attention suggest a role for different modalities in this process, existing studies examining attention effects in syntactic choice are primarily based on visual cueing paradigms. Hence, it remains unclear whether attentional effects on syntactic choice are limited to the visual modality or are indeed more general. This issue is addressed by the current study. Native English participants viewed and described line drawings of simple transitive events while their attention was directed to the location of the agent or the patient of the depicted event by means of either an auditory (monaural beep) or a motor (unilateral key press) lateral cue. Our results show an effect of cue location, with participants producing more passive-voice descriptions in the patient-cued conditions. Crucially, this cue location effect emerged in the motor-cue but not (or substantially less so) in the auditory-cue condition, as confirmed by a reliable interaction between cue location (agent vs. patient) and cue type (auditory vs. motor). Our data suggest that attentional effects on the speaker's syntactic choices are modality-specific and limited to the visual and motor, but not the auditory, domain.
理解句子生成中句法选择的决定因素是心理语言学中的一个重要课题。现有证据表明，句法选择是语言和非语言因素相互作用的结果，而说话者对描述事件元素的关注是其中一个因素。虽然多模态注意力理论表明不同模态在这个过程中都有作用，但现有的研究主要基于视觉提示范式来考察注意力对句法选择的影响。因此，目前尚不清楚注意力对句法选择的影响是否仅限于视觉模态，或者是否更为普遍。本研究旨在解决这一问题。母语为英语的参与者观看并描述简单及物事件的线条图，同时通过听觉（单耳蜂鸣）或运动（单侧按键）侧向提示将注意力引导至所描述事件的施事者或受事者的位置。我们的研究结果表明，提示位置存在影响，即参与者在受事者提示条件下更倾向于使用被动语态进行描述。关键的是，这种提示位置效应仅在运动提示条件下出现，而在听觉提示条件下（或者出现的程度显著降低）则不然，这一发现得到了提示位置（施事者与受事者）和提示类型（听觉与运动）之间的可靠交互作用的证实。我们的数据表明，注意力对说话者句法选择的影响具有模态特异性，仅局限于视觉和运动模态，而与听觉模态无关。
