Abstract
In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast (“dash”) or slow (“dawdle”) movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal and less on the path. These results reveal that event comprehension in the presence of a visual world involves establishing and dynamically updating the locations of entities in response to linguistic descriptions of events.
Highlights
We use language to refer to events in the world
We focus on paths, but use an eye tracking visual world paradigm to index the online allocation of visual attention when understanding sentences involving an agent undergoing an actual motion event
The present results show that dynamic information associated with the inferred speed of a linguistically described motion event influences visual attention and motor execution in a way consistent with simulation-based accounts of language comprehension [5,27]
Summary
We use language to refer to events in the world. Studies of language comprehension using the situation or mental model frameworks (e.g., [1]) have helped demonstrate that language users keep track of a wide variety of information about those events, such as their spatial and temporal properties [2,3]. One such study was done by Spivey, Tyler, Richardson, and Young [15], who found that when hearing stories involving events which occur in a particular direction (e.g., on increasingly higher floors of an apartment building) participants’ eye movements mimicked the directionality of the event in the story, suggesting a scanning process akin to constructing a mental model of the described situation Another eye tracking method that can be used to study simulation in language is the visual world paradigm [16], where spoken language is presented with accompanying scenes. Matlock and Richardson [17] employed this technique in an eye tracking study of sentences with a fictive motion construction They measured eye movements while participants viewed simple scenes featuring horizontal or vertical paths or linearly extended entities, without any agents or goals. For slow verb sentences we expected it would take longer to move the agent to the goal compared with the fast verbs
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