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Giving Good Directions: Order of Mention Reflects Visual Salience

In complex stimuli, there are many different possible ways to refer to a specified target. Previous studies have shown that when people are faced with such a task, the content of their referring expression reflects visual properties such as size, salience, and clutter. Here, we extend these findings...

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Autores principales: Clarke, Alasdair D. F., Elsner, Micha, Rohde, Hannah
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4674625/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26696914
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01793
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author Clarke, Alasdair D. F.
Elsner, Micha
Rohde, Hannah
author_facet Clarke, Alasdair D. F.
Elsner, Micha
Rohde, Hannah
author_sort Clarke, Alasdair D. F.
collection PubMed
description In complex stimuli, there are many different possible ways to refer to a specified target. Previous studies have shown that when people are faced with such a task, the content of their referring expression reflects visual properties such as size, salience, and clutter. Here, we extend these findings and present evidence that (i) the influence of visual perception on sentence construction goes beyond content selection and in part determines the order in which different objects are mentioned and (ii) order of mention influences comprehension. Study 1 (a corpus study of reference productions) shows that when a speaker uses a relational description to mention a salient object, that object is treated as being in the common ground and is more likely to be mentioned first. Study 2 (a visual search study) asks participants to listen to referring expressions and find the specified target; in keeping with the above result, we find that search for easy-to-find targets is faster when the target is mentioned first, while search for harder-to-find targets is facilitated by mentioning the target later, after a landmark in a relational description. Our findings show that seemingly low-level and disparate mental “modules” like perception and sentence planning interact at a high level and in task-dependent ways.
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spelling pubmed-46746252015-12-22 Giving Good Directions: Order of Mention Reflects Visual Salience Clarke, Alasdair D. F. Elsner, Micha Rohde, Hannah Front Psychol Psychology In complex stimuli, there are many different possible ways to refer to a specified target. Previous studies have shown that when people are faced with such a task, the content of their referring expression reflects visual properties such as size, salience, and clutter. Here, we extend these findings and present evidence that (i) the influence of visual perception on sentence construction goes beyond content selection and in part determines the order in which different objects are mentioned and (ii) order of mention influences comprehension. Study 1 (a corpus study of reference productions) shows that when a speaker uses a relational description to mention a salient object, that object is treated as being in the common ground and is more likely to be mentioned first. Study 2 (a visual search study) asks participants to listen to referring expressions and find the specified target; in keeping with the above result, we find that search for easy-to-find targets is faster when the target is mentioned first, while search for harder-to-find targets is facilitated by mentioning the target later, after a landmark in a relational description. Our findings show that seemingly low-level and disparate mental “modules” like perception and sentence planning interact at a high level and in task-dependent ways. Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-12-09 /pmc/articles/PMC4674625/ /pubmed/26696914 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01793 Text en Copyright © 2015 Clarke, Elsner and Rohde. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Clarke, Alasdair D. F.
Elsner, Micha
Rohde, Hannah
Giving Good Directions: Order of Mention Reflects Visual Salience
title Giving Good Directions: Order of Mention Reflects Visual Salience
title_full Giving Good Directions: Order of Mention Reflects Visual Salience
title_fullStr Giving Good Directions: Order of Mention Reflects Visual Salience
title_full_unstemmed Giving Good Directions: Order of Mention Reflects Visual Salience
title_short Giving Good Directions: Order of Mention Reflects Visual Salience
title_sort giving good directions: order of mention reflects visual salience
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4674625/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26696914
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01793
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