Human experience and communication are centred on events, and event apprehension is a rapid process that draws on the visual perception and immediate categorization of event roles (“who does what to whom”). We demonstrate a role for syntactic structure in visual information uptake for event apprehension. An event structure foregrounding either the agent or patient was activated during speaking, transiently modulating the apprehension of subsequently viewed unrelated events. Speakers of Dutch described pictures with actives and passives (agent and patient foregrounding, respectively). First fixations on pictures of unrelated events that were briefly presented (for 300 ms) next were influenced by the active or passive structure of the previously produced sentence. Going beyond the study of how single words cue object perception, we show that sentence structure guides the viewpoint taken during rapid event apprehension.

人类的经验和交流以事件为中心，事件的忧虑是一个快速的过程，它依靠事件角色（“谁对谁做什么”）的视觉感知和即时分类。我们演示了语法结构在事件信息的视觉信息吸收中的作用。在讲话过程中激活了一个以代理或患者为中心的事件结构，从而暂时调节了对随后查看的无关事件的理解。荷兰语的讲者描述了带有主动和被动（分别是代理和患者前景）的图片。接下来简要介绍（持续300 ms）无关事件图片的最初注解受先前产生的句子的主动或被动结构影响。超越了关于单个单词如何提示对象感知的研究，