ABSTRACT

Language sometimes requires tracking the same participant in different thematic roles across multiple visual events (e.g., The girl that another girl pushed chased a third girl). To better understand how vision and language interact in role tracking, participants described videos of multiple randomly moving circles where two push events were presented. A circle might have the same role in both push events (e.g., agent) or different roles (e.g., agent of one push and patient of other push). The first three studies found higher production accuracy for the same role conditions compared to the different role conditions across different linguistic structure manipulations. The last three studies compared a featural account, where role information was associated with particular circles, or a relational account, where role information was encoded with particular push events. These studies found no interference between different roles, contrary to the predictions of the featural account. The foil was manipulated in these studies to increase the saliency of the second push and it was found that this changed the accuracy in describing the first push. The results suggest that language-related thematic role processing uses a relational representation that can encode multiple events.

摘要

语言有时需要在多个视觉事件中跟踪同一参与者在不同主题中的角色（例如，另一个女孩推的女孩追逐第三个女孩）。为了更好地了解视觉和语言如何在角色跟踪中相互作用，参与者描述了多个随机移动圆圈的视频，其中呈现了两个推送事件。一个圈可能在两个推送事件中具有相同的角色（例如，代理）或不同的角色（例如，一个推送的代理和另一个推送的患者）。前三项研究发现，与跨不同语言结构操作的不同角色条件相比，相同角色条件的生产准确性更高。最后三项研究比较了特征帐户，其中角色信息与特定圈子相关联，或关系帐户，其中角色信息与特定推送事件编码。这些研究发现不同角色之间没有干扰，这与特征帐户的预测相反。在这些研究中，箔片被操纵以增加第二次推动的显着性，发现这改变了描述第一次推动的准确性。结果表明，与语言相关的主题角色处理使用可以编码多个事件的关系表示。