AUTOMATED SYNTAX TRIGGERS ATTENTIONAL SHIFT
Andriy Myachykov
University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
miachikov@fulbrightweb.org
The current study utilized an experimental design known as Fish Film (Tomlin 1995, 1997) for the
analysis of Russian on-line descriptions of visually perceived events.
The Fish Film was originally used to test the hypothesis that the syntactic subject assignment in English
narrative may be explained as a reflex of focal attention. In English descriptions of the Fish Film event,
syntactic subject was almost invariably assigned to the cued stimulus. However, this phenomenon might
be restricted to English syntax, which is known for its relative rigidity: it suggests binary variation of
word order based on the alternation between active and passive grammatical voice. Languages with more
combinatorial freedom might not demonstrate direct correlation between syntactic subject assignment and
allocation of attention or this connection might be revealed in ways different from English.
Russian is characterized by a flexible ordering of constituents with a higher-frequency pattern – SVO. A
commonly shared theoretical view of Russian word order holds that clause-level theme, being the given
or old information should enter the sentence first. This provides the solid theoretical prediction that in
Fish Film descriptions, word order variation between subject- and object-first utterances following
association between theme and subject should map onto the cueing scheme. Therefore, the agent-cued
trials should be overwhelmingly covered by agent-first utterances (SVO, SOV) while the patient-cued
trials should be described by patient-first utterances (OVS, passive voice).
Quite in conflict with the specified hypothesis, native Russian speakers preferred agent-first patterns with
predominant SVO to all other available sequences regardless of the cueing. This preference, however,
entailed specific implications: (1) in the utterances that started with the agent regardless of the fact that
the patient fish was cued there was a hidden attentional switch. The speech on-set latencies were
significantly longer (average 202 msec) l than in the trials that “complied” with the cueing; (2) the same
group of utterances was characterized by a significantly higher speech error rate: subjects experienced
difficulties defining which case marker they needed to attach in order to produce the correct sentence.
This phenomenon reflects preference for higher frequency language patterns instead of attentional cueing
for the assignment of the syntactic roles in the languages with active case-marking and flexible word
order. This preference may provide support to the on-line version of linguistic relativity hypothesis (i.e.
Slobin 2003). It is plausible that the persistence of automated syntactic patterns in Russian may originate
an attentional shift from the cued patient to the non-cued agent in the SVO utterances chosen in spite of
the cued patient. This, in effect, may result from a functional competition between cognitive processes
involved in preparation and production of the sentence: the input of perception and the pressure of
automated patterns of language. Both these processes may operate simultaneously on the mental
representation of the dynamic event biasing the resulting syntactic structure. Whereas production of an
English sentence makes it possible to assign the syntactic subject to attentionally detected entity of the
display, the Russian sentence has to undergo a set of reciprocal “negotiations” between the demands of
perceptual input (cueing asymmetry) and habituated preferences in word order. Russian speakers seem to
prefer to follow an automated syntactic option instead of one the most fitting the details of visual display.
This interpretation follows nicely the observation that most of human cognition is “embedded” in
language (Slobin 2003). When negotiating direct correlations with visual world comes at a significant
cognitive cost, the patterns habituated in language may overrule perception in the competition to bias
syntactic alignment. The attentional component, however, may still be present covertly: subjects need to
reallocate attention in order to produce canonical agent-first word order after their attention was attracted
to the patient.
References
Slobin, D. (2003). Language and thought online: cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity. In
Language In Mind, D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (eds.), 157-191. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tomlin, R.S. (1995). Focal Attention, Voice, and Word Order. In Word Order In Discourse, P. Dowing
and M. Noonan (eds.), 517-552. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Tomlin, R.S. (1997). Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: The role of
attention in grammar. In Language and Conceptualization, J. Nuyts and E. Pederson (eds), 162-189.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.