Two experiments are reported which examine how manipulations of visual attention affect speakers' linguistic choices regarding word order, verb use and syntactic structure when describing simple pictured scenes. Experiment 1 presented participants with scenes designed to elicit the use of a perspective predicate (The man chases the dog/The dog flees from the man) or a conjoined noun phrase sentential Subject (A cat and a dog/A dog and a cat). Gaze was directed to a particular scene character by way of an attention-capture manipulation. Attention capture increased the likelihood that this character would be the sentential Subject and altered the choice of perspective verb or word order within conjoined NP Subjects accordingly. Experiment 2 extended these results to word order choice within Active versus Passive structures (The girl is kicking the boy/The boy is being kicked by the girl) and symmetrical predicates (The girl is meeting the boy/The boy is meeting the girl). Experiment 2 also found that early endogenous shifts in attention influence word order choices. These findings indicate a reliable relationship between initial looking patterns and speaking patterns, reflecting considerable parallelism between the on-line apprehension of events and the on-line construction of descriptive utterances.

中文翻译：

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关于事件理解和话语表述之间的取舍

报告了两个实验，它们检验了在描述简单的图片场景时，视觉注意力的操纵如何影响说话者在词序、动词使用和句法结构方面的语言选择。实验 1 向参与者展示了旨在引出使用透视谓词（男人追逐狗/狗逃离男人）或连体名词短语句子主语（一只猫和一只狗/一只狗和一只猫）的场景。凝视通过注意力捕捉操作被定向到特定场景角色。注意捕获增加了这个字符成为句子主语的可能性，并相应地改变了连体 NP 主语中透视动词或词序的选择。实验 2 将这些结果扩展到主动与被动结构（女孩正在踢男孩/男孩被女孩踢）和对称谓词（女孩正在遇见男孩/男孩正在遇见女孩）中的词序选择。实验 2 还发现，注意力的早期内生转移会影响词序选择。这些发现表明初始看模式和说话模式之间存在可靠的关系，反映了对事件的在线理解和描述性话语的在线构建之间的相当大的平行性。