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The current study seeks to investigate (i) how the presentation of the patient or agent referent in a transitive event 300 ms prior to the presentation of the full scene (i.e., ‘visual gating’) affects speakers’ scene description and (ii) whether there are cross-linguistic differences in how visual gating affects scene description. We will use the same materials and procedure to test language production in the following languages: English, German, Turkish, Russian, Mandarin Chinese. What these languages have in common is that subjects/agents precede objects/patients when following a pragmatically unmarked word order. Differences include but are not limited to the morphological marking of subjects and objects (no marking: English, Mandarin Chinese; morphological marking: German, Turkish, Russian), the position of the verb (verb-second vs. verb-final), and the availability of structural alternatives for agent- and patient-initial sentences, as well as the frequency of use thereof.

This project contains data and the documentation of the analysis procedures of the study "Planning sentences and sentence intonation in Estonian". Two eye-tracking experiments investigated the real-time planning of sentences and examined whether the prosodic planning depends on the conceptual and/or linguistic representation of incipient utterances. The results show that sentence-initial intonation peaks are highly sensitive to sentences’ duration, and not to the different degrees of conceptual complexity. Furthermore, eye movements indicate for Estonian—a morphological case-marking language—that sentence production is highly likely to start with a comprehensive conceptual plan. In overall, the study supports an idea that advance planning of sentence intonation depends on the linguistic representation that is derived from a detailed relational framework of incipient sentences.