Two experiments are reported that examine how manipulations of visual attention affect speakers' linguistic choices regarding word order, verb use and syntactic structure when describing simple pictured scenes. Experiment 1 presented participants with scenes designed to elicit the use of a perspective predicate ("The man chases the dog/The dog…

We tested the effect of local lexical ambiguities while manipulating the type of prosodic boundary at which the ambiguity occurred, using French sentences and participants. We observed delayed lexical access when a local lexical ambiguity occurred within a phonological phrase (consistent with previous research; e.g., '[un chat grincheux],'…