Effect of Visual Cueing and Referent Position on Syntactic Choices Varies With Language Flexibility and Language Status as L1/L2: Evidence From L1 Hindi and L2 English Sentence Production

Previous studies on sentence production have shown that the accessibility of a referent in the speaker's mind influences the syntactic structure selected during utterance planning. The present study investigated how the effect of referent accessibility on structural choice during sentence production is influenced by language constraints, such as free vs. fixed word order, and by language status as L1 or L2. Hindi, a flexible word-order language with rich case-marking, allows constituent reordering without changing grammatical roles, whereas English, a fixed word-order language, requires a passive construction to place patient referent in the sentence initial position. In an event-description task, referent accessibility was manipulated through visual cueing (agent-cued vs. patient-cued) and referent position (agent-left vs. patient-left), while Hindi-English bilinguals produced sentences in Hindi (L1) and English (L2). In Hindi, visual cueing of the patient resulted in object-initial sentences through scrambling, whereas in English, no significant effect of visual cueing on structural choice was observed. In contrast, referent position exerted a robust influence on sentence structure in both languages. Left-positioned patients elicited more object-initial sentences in Hindi and more passive voice constructions in English. Eye-movement patterns reflected both independent and interactive effects of visual cueing and referent position in the two languages. These findings suggest that the influence of referent accessibility on structural choices is constrained by language flexibility and by the L1/L2 status of language in bilingual speakers.