Visual cueing affects the processing of grammatical structure: A self-paced reading study on non-canonical word order in Bulgarian
Compensis P (2023)
Publication Type: Conference contribution, Original article
Publication year: 2023
Book Volume: 45
Pages Range: 1863-1868
Conference Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Event location: Sydney
Open Access Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8h82q5q1#main
Abstract
Visual attention can influence how language is processed. For instance, previous research showed that visual cueing of a referent affects the choice of a particular grammatical structure. The present study extended this research to language comprehension and investigated whether visually cueing either the subject or the object of an event affects the interpretation of a textual event description in Bulgarian with either a subject-initial or object-initial word order. The presence of a visual cue matching the sentence-initial argument decreased self-paced reading reaction times and altered the accuracy in response to a comprehension question. Differences were found depending on the gender of the referent, highlighting the interaction of the visual cue and other linguistic information such as case marking. This study demonstrates that visually induced "context" can affect the linguistic salience of a referent in discourse and illustrates the interaction of domain-general cognitive mechanisms in language processing.
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How to cite
APA:
Compensis, P. (2023). Visual cueing affects the processing of grammatical structure: A self-paced reading study on non-canonical word order in Bulgarian. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. On (Eds.), Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1863-1868). Sydney, AU.
MLA:
Compensis, Paul. "Visual cueing affects the processing of grammatical structure: A self-paced reading study on non-canonical word order in Bulgarian." Proceedings of the CogSci 2023, Sydney Ed. M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. On, 2023. 1863-1868.
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