Do visual cues influence how sentences with different word orders are processed?

Psycholinguistics is the study of how people process (i.e., understand) and produce language. However, most work in the field to date has focused solely on English. In fact, of the 6k+ languages in the world, only around 0.6% have been studied using psycholinguistic methods. This means that the diversity of the world's languages is drastically underrepresented in the literature and it remains unknown whether many theories and findings are generalisable. This research contributes to addressing these concerns, by investigating the processing of word order variation cross-linguistically. We aim to answer the following: do visual cues influence how sentences with different word orders are processed? We address this using behavioural methods. Our language sample is English and Italian.

Explicit (i.e., "obvious") visual cues have been shown to assist in sentence processing. In the sentence "put the apple on the towel in the box", it is unclear whether I should put an apple that is already on a towel into a box, or whether I should put an apple onto a towel that is already in a box. Seeing an image that obviously clears up this confusion (e.g., an apple already on a towel) helps people to process such sentences.

Implicit (i.e., "unobvious") visual cues have been shown to influence sentence production. When people's attention is "unconsciously" drawn towards an object/character, they tend to begin their sentence with that object/character. These cues seem to trigger a "way of thinking about" the scene which affects how they speak about it. We assume that this "way of thinking" should affect not just how we produce, but also process, sentences. However, implicit cueing has yet to be used to investigate sentence processing.

In general, English relies primarily on word order to indicate what roles participants are playing in a sentence. In "John kicked Peter", we know that "John" is the one doing the action and "Peter" is the one that is acted upon. Italian, however, permits freer word order variation, allowing "scrambled" sentences like "(he) kicked Peter John". This is because Italian verbs always take an ending that 'agrees with' the one doing the verb. It remains unknown, though, whether there is a one-to-one mapping between which participant(s) people's attention is drawn to (and in what order) and what word order they expect in a sentence.

We employ a version of the implicit cueing paradigm adapted to sentence processing work to investigate this. This allows us to tap into processes that are "beyond conscious awareness", thus reducing interference from intentional, conscious thought processes. We will conduct three experiments in the University of Manchester's Psycholinguistics Lab. Fieldwork is also planned in Italy.

This work will contribute to ongoing research in "situated language processing" - an approach to language research which emphasises the important contributions that non-linguistic sources of information make during language processing. Findings have the potential to influence language teaching methods that make use of implicit priming techniques to assist in developing comprehension strategies.