LOOKING BIAS: AN EXAMINATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VISUAL SEARCH AND PRENOMINAL ADJECTIVE ORDER IN ENGLISH

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to determine the relationship between the order of analysis of objects within the visual system and prenominal adjective ordering rules in English, as past syntactic and semantic theories have proven insufficient to explain the phenomenon in its entirety. Three experiments were designed to investigate whether ordering preferences when multiple adjectives are stacked before a noun are determined by properties of the visual system that subsequently map directly onto language via the semantic system. First, an experimental protocol was designed to discover whether participants’ visual search pattern varied based on the type of stimuli presented. A second experiment was created to determine whether participants observed features of objects in an order that corresponded to grammatical adjective ordering rules in English. A third and final experiment was devised to explore whether inversions of adjective categories typically positioned closer to the noun were more acceptable than inversions of adjective categories placed further away from the noun or vice versa. Eye tracking data was analyzed for scan sequence (Experiments 1 and 2) and acceptability judgments were obtained using a 7-point Likert Scale survey (Experiment 3). Results showed that participants did not vary systematic scan patterns based on image type, with a greater propensity to not fixate when presented with shapes. Data from the second experiment demonstrated that participants viewed objects in an order that was correlated with prenominal adjective ordering with varying levels of significance. Acceptability judgments from the third experiment indicated that inversions of adjective classes that are typically placed closer to the noun were generally more acceptable than inversions of adjective classes typically placed further from the noun. This study provides preliminary evidence that language rules may be derived from properties of the visual system and cognition. Further research is necessary to explore the nature and extent of correlations between perception, the semantic system, and grammatical features of language.