Abstract
Eye-tracking findings suggest people prefer to ground their spoken language comprehension by focusing on recently seen events more than anticipating future events: When the verb in NP1-VERB-ADV-NP2 sentences was referentially ambiguous between a recently depicted and an equally plausible future clipart action, listeners fixated the target of the recent action more often at the verb than the object that hadn’t yet been acted upon. We examined whether this inspection preference generalizes to real-world events, and whether it is (vs. isn’t) modulated by how often people see recent and future events acted out. In a first eye-tracking study, the experimenter performed an action (e.g., sugaring pancakes), and then a spoken sentence either referred to that action or to an equally plausible future action (e.g., sugaring strawberries). At the verb, people more often inspected the pancakes (the recent target) than the strawberries (the future target), thus replicating the recent-event preference with these real-world actions. Adverb tense, indicating a future versus past event, had no effect on participants’ visual attention. In a second study we increased the frequency of future actions such that participants saw 50/50 future and recent actions. During the verb people mostly inspected the recent action target, but subsequently they began to rely on tense, and anticipated the future target more often for future than past tense adverbs. A corpus study showed that the verbs and adverbs indicating past versus future actions were equally frequent, suggesting long-term frequency biases did not cause the recent-event preference. Thus, (a) recent real-world actions can rapidly influence comprehension (as indexed by eye gaze to objects), and (b) people prefer to first inspect a recent action target (vs. an object that will soon be acted upon), even when past and future actions occur with equal frequency. A simple frequency-of-experience account cannot accommodate these findings.
Highlights
The role of prediction in language and cognition is a muchdebated issue in the cognitive sciences
For language comprehension the important role of predictive processes is evidenced by both findings from studies recording event-related brain potentials (e.g., Berkum et al, 2005; DeLong et al, 2005) and from studies tracking eye movements (e.g., Altmann and Kamide, 1999; Sedivy et al, 1999; Kamide et al, 2003a,b; see Aborn et al, 1959; Tulving and Gold, 1963; Fischler and Bloom, 1979, for related early studies on word prediction in sentence context)
Visual event-related brain potential (ERP) recordings showed that when a definite article was incongruous with the contextually most-expected noun, mean amplitude ERPs to the determiner were more negative going relative to when the determiner was congruous with the contextually most-expected noun (DeLong et al, 2005)
Summary
The role of prediction in language and cognition is a muchdebated issue in the cognitive sciences. For language comprehension the important role of predictive processes is evidenced by both findings from studies recording event-related brain potentials (e.g., Berkum et al, 2005; DeLong et al, 2005) and from studies tracking eye movements (e.g., Altmann and Kamide, 1999; Sedivy et al, 1999; Kamide et al, 2003a,b; see Aborn et al, 1959; Tulving and Gold, 1963; Fischler and Bloom, 1979, for related early studies on word prediction in sentence context). Anticipatory gaze effects during spoken language comprehension can be elicited by information from www.frontiersin.org
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