Giving good directions: order of mention reflects visual salience

Abstract

In complex stimuli, there are many different possible ways to refer to a specified target. Previousstudies have shown that when people are faced with such a task, the content of their referringexpression reflects visual properties such as size, salience and clutter. Here, we extend thesefindings and present evidence that (i) the influence of visual perception on sentence constructiongoes beyond content selection and in part determines the order in which different objects arementioned and (ii) order of mention influences comprehension. Study 1 (a corpus study ofreference productions) shows that when a speaker uses a relational description to mention asalient object, that object is treated as being in the common ground and is more likely to bementioned first. Study 2 (a visual search study) asks participants to listen to referring expressionsand find the specified target; in keeping with the above result, we find that search for easy-to-findtargets is faster when the target is mentioned first, while search for harder-to-find targets isfacilitated by mentioning the target later, after a landmark in a relational description. Our findingsshow that seemingly low-level and disparate mental modules like perception and sentenceplanning interact at a high level and in task-dependent ways