Given that stronger priming effects are normally obtained for less frequent than more frequent lexical items and for dispreferred than preferred structures (see Ferreira & Bock, 2006), the results demonstrate that speakers have a selleck chemicals llc strong preference for treating agents as “default” subjects. The implication of this result for theories of formulation is that accessibility effects are modulated by higher-level, relational information: in order to prioritize encoding of the agent, speakers first had to identify the two characters in terms of their event roles. The

degree to which identification of agents requires extensive encoding of event gist is debatable because of lower-level perceptual correlates of “agenthood” (Hafri et al., 2012); nevertheless, selection of starting points appears to be sensitive to a combination of non-relational and relational variables. Consistent with this conclusion is also the effect of Event codability on sentence form. B-Raf mutation The influence of patient primes was stronger in “harder” than “easier” events: the patient primes reduced the likelihood of selecting the preferred active structure to describe “hard” events, suggesting that increasing the accessibility of patient names increased their suitability

for starting points in cases where properties of the event did not facilitate selection of a starting point on conceptual grounds. Character accessibility played a smaller role in “easier” events, or events where speakers could initiate production without relying on properties of the two characters to select a starting point. The direction of this effect is consistent with Kuchinsky and Bock’s (2010) finding that drawing attention to one character is less likely to bias assignment of this character to subject position in “easier” than “harder” events. More importantly, we tested whether these differences in

non-relational and relational encoding also Thiamet G produced different patterns of eye movements across items and conditions before speech onset. The first test of incrementality is the analysis of first fixations, and the results were consistent with linear incrementality: the first-fixated character was more likely to become the sentence subject than the other character. This replicates studies using cuing paradigms to test the effect of gaze shifts on sentence form (Gleitman et al., 2007, Kuchinsky & Bock, 2010) without a direct manipulation of perceptual salience and attention capture. The second test of incrementality is the analysis of eye movements to event characters throughout the formulation process. Timecourse analyses showed a combination of accessibility effects and effects of relational variables on formulation. Eye movements in the first time window (0–400 ms) showed immediate sensitivity to properties of the agents: speakers directed their gaze towards “easier” agents and away from “harder” agents.