Incremental interpretation at verbs: restricting the domain of subsequent reference

Abstract

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they inspected a semi-realistic visual scene showing a boy, a cake, and various distractor objects. Whilst viewing this scene, they heard sentences such as`the boy will move the cake' or`the boy will eat the cake'. The cake was the only edible object portrayed in the scene. In each of two experiments, the onset of saccadic eye movements to the target object (the cake) was signi®cantly later in the move condition than in the eat condition; saccades to the target were launched after the onset of the spoken word cake in the move condition, but before its onset in the eat condition. The results suggest that information at the verb can be used to restrict the domain within the context to which subsequent reference will be made by the (as yet unencountered) post-verbal grammatical object. The data support a hypothesis in which sentence processing is driven by the predictive relationships between verbs, their syntactic arguments, and the real-world contexts in which they occur. q

Syntactic predictability in the recognition of carefully and casually produced speech.

“…Given that previous research has shown that listeners are able to predict upcoming words (e.g. Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Arai & Keller, 2013;Kamide et al, 2003), the question arises as to why participants were not predicting the target word in the present study. One difference between our study and previous work is the time that listeners had in order to develop a prediction about the upcoming input.…”

“…In previous studies that found target fixations before the target's acoustic onset, there was at least one word in between the predictive precursor and the target. For example, Altmann and Kamide (1999) presented sentences such as "The boy will eat the cake" in which the word "eat" is predictive of the word "cake". Thus, in their study, the two words do not follow each other but are separated by the definite article "the".…”

Disfluencies and human language comprehension

“…Filtering assumes that the parser must remove disfluencies so that it can then operate on sanitized input consisting of only words and prosodically licensed acoustic cues [18]. This solution is unlikely to work because the language comprehension system is known to operate incrementally: Input is interpreted as it is received [19][20][21][22][23], and the system even tries to predict words and structure [22,23]. Therefore, it cannot be true that the parser begins to build constituents only once the input has been cleansed of disfluencies.…”

“…Consider a simple example such as 'Mary will put -throw the ball'. The word recognition system would retrieve put, which would activate the structures associated with put (an object and a location) [22]. But the rest of the utterance makes clear that put was said in error, and the intended verb is throw.…”

Time Course of Frequency Effects in Spoken-Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye Movements

“…A growing number of researchers, building on work by Cooper (1974), have recently begun to use eye movements to explore questions about the time course of spoken-language comprehension (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000;Tanenhaus & Spivey-Knowlton, 1996;Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999). In the version of the eye-tracking paradigm introduced by Tanenhaus et al (1995), participants follow spoken instructions to manipulate real or pictured objects displayed on a computer screen while their eye movements to the objects are monitored using a lightweight camera mounted on a head band.…”