Look at the images. Write one sentence that describes where the two objects are. Do this quickly, without discussion.
Describe the scene
Describe the scene
Why did you start with the fish?
Language is planned in real time
Writers and speakers do not normally wait until a full sentence is completely planned before they start producing it.
Instead, planning language unfolds incrementally and in parallel to output (Roeser et al., 2025):
- the message is still being organised;
- upcoming words are being selected;
- spelling or sound forms are being retrieved;
- while speech, typing, or handwriting is already underway.
All we need is a starting point.
How do people choose a starting point?
Several pressures can point to different starting points.
Visual salience
size, luminance, position, brief/subliminal cues
Conceptual salience
animacy, vividness, event role, causal prominence
Lexical accessibility
obvious names, ease of naming, spelling accessibility
Information structure
given/new, topical, contrastive, novel referents
Spatial habits
reading and writing direction
Grammar
word order, voice, relational phrases, syntactic priming
The experimental question is which pressure carries most weight when they disagree: do people start with what is visually prominent, conceptually salient, easy to name, discourse-relevant, or grammatically expected? (Allum & Wheeldon, 2007; Bock & Warren, 1985; Dolscheid & Penke, 2023; Garcia et al., 2023; Gerwien et al., 2025; Gleitman et al., 2007; Marklová & Delucchi Danhier, 2023; Roeser et al., 2019)
Draw the sentence
You need a blank sheet of paper.
I will tell you a sentence. Draw the event.
Do this quickly. No discussion yet.
Why start with drawing?
Drawing makes a hidden choice visible.
To draw a sentence, you have to decide:
- who is doing the action;
- who or what the action affects;
- where to place each participant;
- which direction the event seems to unfold in.
That is already a simple model of sentence meaning.
Language maps onto space (Chatterjee et al., 1999)
When asked to represent simple sentences such as:
The circle pushes the square.
participants tended to place the agent on the left and the patient on the right.
The puzzle
Why do many people draw the agent on the left?
The bias is not fixed. Several kinds of experience may contribute:
- Reading direction: left-to-right and right-to-left readers can show different preferred directions (Esaulova et al., 2021; Maass et al., 2014; Smith & Elias, 2013).
- Literacy: drawing-direction biases vary with culture and literacy experience, including comparisons with illiterate participants (Butler et al., 2014; Tosun & Vaid, 2014).
- Word order: canonical word order and word-order flexibility can change the strength or direction of agent-left biases (Maass et al., 2014; Roeser et al., 2026; Suitner et al., 2021).
- Word order, literacy, and bilingualism combined: Spanish/Yucatec Maya scene description (Butler et al., 2014; Skopeteas & Verhoeven, 2005).
So this is not just about drawing. It is about how language experience shapes event representations and sentence planning.
A simple but powerful idea
The language people speak, read, and write may influence how they (mentally) organise events in space and how they begin sentences.
Bilinguals are useful here because different kinds of experience can be separated:
- languages differ in word order preferences (Roeser et al., 2026; Suitner et al., 2021);
- scripts differ in reading and writing direction (Faghihi & Vaid, 2023; Maass et al., 2014);
- words can overlap across languages, as in the computer / der Computer (Bernolet et al., 2012; Cai et al., 2011);
- experience with several of these systems (Garcia et al., 2025; Van Gompel & Arai, 2018).
You could test whether sentence order, picture direction, script context, cognate status, spelling accessibility, or bilingual profile changes where people start.
Three useful task families
Does language experience / knowledge affect how an event is processed or described?
Image description
Participants see one event picture or a two-image arrangement, then describe it.
Manipulate: picture direction, object accessibility, spelling difficulty, language context.
Measure: first-mentioned referent, response time.
Sentence-picture match
Participants read / hear a sentence, then decide whether a picture matches it.
Manipulate: word order, picture direction, language, script context.
Measure: accuracy, response time.
Sentence-structure priming
Participants read / hear a sentence, then describe a new picture.
Manipulate: prime-sentence structure, prime picture direction, active language, cognate overlap.
Measure: sentence structure.
Example 1: sentence order and event pictures
In our Tagalog/English work (Roeser et al., 2026), participants read a sentence and then judged whether a picture matched it.
1Sentence
The duck is pushing the lion.
→
2Picture
agent-left or agent-right
→
3Decision
match / mismatch
English speakers’ picture processing was sensitive to the sentence structure they had just read.
Tagalog speakers did not show the same broad behavioural pattern, consistent with Tagalog having more flexible word order.
Example 2: spelling and starting points
Task: write a sentence describing the arrangement.
the piranha is next to the swing
Question: which image do they name first?
Spelling manipulation:
piranha pirahna prianha
Finding: Difficult spelling affects starting point in Urdu-English bilinguals but not in English monolinguals.
Recommended starting points
Read with the design question in mind: what did the authors manipulate, and what did they measure?
- Classic spatial agency bias: Chatterjee et al. (1999)
- Reading/writing direction review: Faghihi & Vaid (2023)
- Cross-cultural spatial agency bias: Maass et al. (2014)
- Agent-first preferences and event pictures: Esaulova et al. (2021)
- Spatial-bias and word order: Roeser et al. (2026)
- Cross-linguistic structural priming: Van Gompel & Arai (2018); Garcia et al. (2025)
- Sentence priming with cognates: Van Gompel & Arai (2018); Cai et al. (2011); Bernolet et al. (2012)
References
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