Abstract
In interpreting spoken sentences in event contexts, comprehenders both integrate their current interpretation of language with the recent past (e.g., events they have witnessed) and develop expectations about future event possibilities. Tense cues can disambiguate this linking but temporary ambiguity in their interpretation may lead comprehenders to also rely on further, situation-specific cues (e.g., an actor's gaze as a cue to his future actions). How comprehenders reconcile these different cues in real time is an open issue that we must address to accommodate comprehension. It has been suggested that relating a referential expression (e.g., a verb) to a referent (e.g., a recent event) is preferred over relying on other cues that refer to the future and are not yet referentially grounded (“recent-event preference”). Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments compared this recent-event preference with effects of an actor's gaze and of tense/temporal adverbs as cues to a future action event. The results revealed that people overall preferred to focus on the recent (vs. future) event target in their interpretation, suggesting that while a congruent and incongruent actor gaze can jointly with futuric linguistic cues neutralize the recent-event preference late in the sentence, the latter still plays a key role in shaping participants' initial verb-based event interpretation. Additional post-experimental memory tests provided insight into the longevity of the gaze effects.
Highlights
Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that spoken language comprehension is highly sensitive to various linguistic and non-linguistic information sources
Our prediction was that if the recent-event preference is a strong contextual behavior, which might be partly guided by the verb, participants’ overall preference for inspecting the recentevent target should disappear as follows: First, it should disappear when participants realize that the actor’s gaze cue accompanying the futuric present tense from the verb onset goes toward the future target in Experiment 1
Eye-tracking results revealed that participants overall preferentially inspected the recent-event target in replication of recent-event preference patterns (e.g., Knoeferle et al, 2011; Abashidze et al, 2019), except in the last word region, in which the significant intercept disappeared
Summary
Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that spoken language comprehension is highly sensitive to various linguistic and non-linguistic information sources. It seems that verb meaning trumped temporal cues in influencing how an utterance was related in real time to action events, providing a strong recent-event preference that is in line with evidence for the Coordinated Interplay Account (Knoeferle and Crocker, 2006, 2007). These gaze patterns of the overall recent-event preference further replicated when future events were much more frequent within the experiment than recent events (Abashidze et al, 2019). These findings show that both the timing of stimuli and the incongruence of an actor’s gaze (and of pictures) with language play an important role in language processing within the visual context
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