Predicting (variability of) context effects in language comprehension

Knoeferle, Pia

doi:10.1007/s41809-019-00025-5

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 129 publications

(177 reference statements)

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“…This perspective is congruent with that proposed by Altmann and Kamide (2007), in which language processing reflects an increasingly complex mental world as the comprehender draws on their knowledge of scenes and events [see also work by McRae and Matsuki (2009)showing rapid effects of world knowledge on comprehension]. Critically, Knoeferle (2019) proposes that not all effects of visual context may be caused by the same underlying mechanism-distinct language-world relations elicit distinct context effects-and demonstrates a strong role for comprehender-specific characteristics modulating context effects during comprehension.…”

Section: Language Comprehension and Visual Context: An Integrated Persupporting

confidence: 73%

Language and perception: Introduction to the Special Issue “Speakers and Listeners in the Visual World”

et al. 2019

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Language and perception are two central cognitive systems. Until relatively recently, however, the interaction between them has been examined only partially and not from an over-arching theoretical perspective. Yet it has become clear that linguistic and perceptual interactions are essential to understanding both typical and atypical human behaviour. In this editorial, we examine the link between language and perception across three domains. First, we present a brief review of work investigating the importance of perceptual features, particularly shape bias, when learning names for novel objects-a critical skill acquired during language development. Second, we describe the Visual World Paradigm, an experimental method uniquely suited to investigate the languageperception relationship. Studies using the Visual World Paradigm demonstrate that the relationship between linguistic and perceptual information during processing is both intricate and bi-directional: linguistic cues guide interpretation of visual scenes, while perceptual information shapes interpretation of linguistic input. Finally, we turn to a discussion of cospeech gesture focusing on iconic gestures which depict aspects of the visual world (e.g., motion, shape).The relationship between language and these semantically-meaningful gestures is likewise complex and bi-directional. However, more research is needed to illuminate the exact circumstances under which iconic gestures shape language production and comprehension. In conclusion, although strong evidence exists supporting a critical relationship between linguistic and perceptual systems, the exact levels at which these two systems interact, the time-course of the interaction, and what is driving the interaction, remain largely open questions in need of future research.

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Section: Language Comprehension and Visual Context: An Integrated Persupporting

confidence: 73%

Language and perception: Introduction to the Special Issue “Speakers and Listeners in the Visual World”

et al. 2019

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“…Our findings show that verb-action relations and nonreferential emotional world-language relations seem to inform real-time language processing to different degrees (see Knoeferle, 2019 for a comprehensive review). Action effects were pervasive in all age groups; the speaker's emotional prime face only facilitated younger adults' sentence processing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Alternatively, do they modulate comprehension in distinct ways (Knoeferle et al, 2014 ; Kreysa et al, 2018 ; Knoeferle, 2019 )—much like different sorts of linguistic knowledge are processed distinctly (Hagoort, 2003 ; Huettig and McQueen, 2007 ; Bastiaansen and Hagoort, 2015 ; Lapinskaya et al, 2016 )? Initial evidence suggests that referential and non-referential world-language relations modulate comprehension and visual attention in distinct ways with referential relations eliciting more visual attention to objects than non-referential relations (Cooper, 1974 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Referential vs. Non-referential World-Language Relations: How Do They Modulate Language Comprehension in 4 to 5-Year-Olds, Younger, and Older Adults?

Maquate

Knoeferle

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Age has been shown to influence language comprehension, with delays, for instance, in older adults' expectations about upcoming information. We examined to what extent expectations about upcoming event information (who-does-what-to-whom) change across the lifespan (in 4- to 5-year-old children, younger, and older adults) and as a function of different world-language relations. In a visual-world paradigm, participants in all three age groups inspected a speaker whose facial expression was either smiling or sad. Next they inspected two clipart agents (e.g., a smiling cat and a grumpy rat) depicted as acting upon a patient (e.g., a ladybug tickled by the cat and arrested by the rat). Control scenes featured the same three characters without the action depictions. While inspecting the depictions, comprehenders listened to a German sentence [e.g., Den Marienkäfer kitzelt vergnügt der Kater; literally: “The ladybug (object/patient) tickles happily the cat (subject/agent)”]. Referential verb-action relations (i.e., when the actions were present) could, in principle, cue the cat-agent and so could non-referential relations via links from the speaker's smile to “happily” and the cat's smile. We examined variation in participants' visual anticipation of the agent (the cat) before it was mentioned depending on (a) participant age and (b) whether the referentially mediated action depiction or the non-referentially associated speaker smile cued the agent. The action depictions rapidly boosted participants' visual anticipation of the agent, facilitating thematic role assignment in all age groups. By contrast, effects of the non-referentially cued speaker smile emerged in the younger adults only. We outline implications of these findings for processing accounts of the temporally coordinated interplay between listeners' age-dependent language comprehension, their interrogation of the visual context, and visual context influences.

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“…They point out that the majority of studies has examined decontextualized metaphors only, even though metaphors are typically embedded in rich communicative and extralinguistic contexts. Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that literal utterances are integrated incrementally with context, influencing even the earliest stages of sentence interpretation (see Huettig et al, 2011;Knoeferle, 2019;Knoeferle & Guerra, 2016;Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 2006, for reviews). The integration of an utterance in context determines the unfolding interpretation and helps generate expectations about upcoming input (Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Sedivy et al, 1999;Tanenhaus et al, 1995, among many others).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When sequence matters: the processing of contextually biased German verb–object metaphors

2022

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Several studies have investigated the comprehension of decontextualized English nominal metaphors. However, not much is known about how contextualized, non-nominal, non-English metaphors are processed, and how this might inform existing theories of metaphor comprehension. In the current work, we investigate the effects of context and of sequential order for an under-studied type of construction: German verb–object metaphors. In two visual-world, eye-tracking experiments, we manipulated whether a discourse context biased a spoken target utterance toward a metaphoric or a literal interpretation. We also manipulated the order of verb and object in the target utterances (e.g., Stefan interviewt eine Hyäne, ‘Stefan interviews a hyena’, verb→object; and Stefan wird eine Hyäne interviewen, ‘Stefan will a hyena interview’, object→verb). Experiment 1 shows that contextual cues interacted with sequential order, mediating the processing of verb–object metaphors: When the context biased toward a metaphoric interpretation, participants readily understood the object metaphorically for the verb→object sequence, whereas they likely first understood it literally for the object→verb sequence. Crucially, no such effect of sequential order was found when context biased toward a literal interpretation. Experiment 2 suggests that differences in processing found in Experiment 1 were brought on by the interaction of discourse context and sequential order and not by sequential order alone. We propose ways in which existing theoretical views could be extended to account for these findings. Overall, our study shows the importance of context during figurative language comprehension and highlights the need to test the predictions of metaphor theories on non-English and non-nominal metaphors.

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Predicting (variability of) context effects in language comprehension

Cited by 14 publications

References 129 publications

Language and perception: Introduction to the Special Issue “Speakers and Listeners in the Visual World”

Language and perception: Introduction to the Special Issue “Speakers and Listeners in the Visual World”

Referential vs. Non-referential World-Language Relations: How Do They Modulate Language Comprehension in 4 to 5-Year-Olds, Younger, and Older Adults?

When sequence matters: the processing of contextually biased German verb–object metaphors

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