They were also somewhat more likely to shift their gaze to the patient earlier after neutral primes than passive primes (the second contrast in the interaction of Prime condition with Time bin). Experiment 2 showed effects of non-relational and relational variables on both sentence form and sentence formulation that were similar to those used in Experiment 1. With respect to sentence form, the results showed the expected robust effects of character accessibility and structural priming.

Properties of agents were again strong predictors of sentence form, see more consistent with linear incrementality. The structural priming manipulation showed that sentence form was also influenced by changes in the ease of deploying abstract structure-building procedures, and again, the primes differed in their priming ability: speakers produced a comparable number of active sentences after active primes and neutral primes, whereas only passive primes reliably reduced production of actives. Effects of the active primes were limited to items with “harder” agents, or items where properties of the

agent favored selection of a passive structure rather than the preferred active structure. Thus as in Experiment 1, the asymmetry in priming effects selleck screening library is consistent with earlier observations that generation of a frequent structure is influenced by priming to a lesser degree than generation of an infrequent structure. More importantly, the timecourse of formulation again showed sensitivity to the ease of encoding non-relational and relational information. First, the analysis of first fixations showed that the degree to which speakers began sentences with the first-fixated character depended on higher-level factors. The suitability of a character for subjecthood depended

on the ease of encoding the event and the ease of constructing a suitable sentence structure: first-fixated characters were less likely to become subjects in “easier” events than “harder” events and in structurally primed sentences than unprimed sentences. Thus overall, the influence of visual information on selection of a starting point was relatively weak: although speakers may begin sentences with the first-fixated character in subject ID-8 position (Experiment 1, linear incrementality), sentence form is also the product of more complex interactions between lower-level perceptual factors and higher-level relational factors (Experiment 2, hierarchical incrementality). Second, timecourse analyses showed a strong influence of variables influencing encoding of relational information and a weaker effect of variables influencing encoding of non-relational information. Effects of Event and Agent codability (Table 5) were comparable to those in Experiment 1 (Table 3), as the two experiments used similar items.