(How) Visual properties affect the perception and description of transitive events

Abstract

In a non-verbal aesthetic judgement task and a pre-registered production task, we tested how the orientation of the patient relative to the agent in a visual scene affects the perception and description of the depicted transitive event. Previous research has shown that a visual property like the position of the patient relative to the agent can affect speakers’ verbalization of events. Here, we investigated whether orientation constitutes another factor besides position that affects scene description. While speakers of German displayed an overall preference for scenes in which agent and patient faced each other, these scenes needed more time for sentence planning than the same scenes that showed the patient looking in the same direction and thus away from the agent. Moreover, we elicited more patient-initial sentences for face-to-face scenes than for same-direction scenes. The increase in patient-initial sentences was comparable to the increase in patient-initial sentences for scenes with left-positioned patients as compared to right-positioned patients. Based on our findings, we argue that manipulations of both position and orientation can change the prominence of the patient. The more prominent the patient (facing the agent, being placed to the left of the agent), the more likely speakers are to choose the patient as the sentence-initial subject. Hence, subtle changes of visual properties may affect not only how speakers perceive an event but also how they describe an event. Our findings are of relevance for a range of tasks that use visual materials.