Motor (But Not Auditory) Attention Affects Syntactic Choice

Mikhail Pokhoday (), Christoph Scheepers (), Yury Shtyrov () and Andriy Myachykov ()
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Mikhail Pokhoday: National Research University Higher School of Economics
Christoph Scheepers: University of Glasgow
Yury Shtyrov: National Research University Higher School of Economics
Andriy Myachykov: National Research University Higher School of Economics

HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract: 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 may be subject to cross-modal interaction. The current study addressed this issue. 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 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 dependent and appear to be more prominent in the visuomotor domain than in the auditory domain

Keywords: visual; auditory; motor; attention; sentence production; syntactic choice; priming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta and nep-neu
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Published in WP BRP Series: Science, Psychology / PSY, October 2017, pages 1-16

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