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Abstract:
Increasingly, psycholinguists are tracking eye
movements during listening. Shifts in visual attention are
clearly linked to the conceptual representations that
result from language comprehension. However, there
has been little evidence that this paradigm taps the
transitory linguistic structures that form the foundation
of sentence comprehension. Altmann and Kamide's
(1999, Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2001) research is the
closest approximation. They have shown, for example,
that listeners begin looking to a cake upon hearing "The
boy ate the..." and that such looks are modulated by the combined
constraints of the verb and the sentential subject. These
data may suggest that listeners use verb argument structure to
direct attention to likely arguments prior to phonological
evidence of the arguments. However, the data are also
consistent with a view in which the listener's gaze shifts in
response to situational schema or non-linguistic plausibility
assessments. On this account, listeners would be expected
to look at a bed upon hearing "The boy slept..." even though
"bed" is not a potential argument of "slept."
To differentiate these accounts, I manipulated
both argument status and typicality of the target picture (see
example sentences below). Participants viewed a four-photo
array depicting the subject, direct object, a filler picture, and
either a typical or atypical recipient/instrument/location while
listening to sentences containing dative, transitive
action, or intransitive verbs. The only task was answering
comprehension questions. I analyzed participant gaze during
an interval immediately following verb onset until early in the
PP containing the target recipient, instrument, or
location. Looks to the sentential subject predominated
initially, then sharply declined in dative and transitive
conditions, but not intransitive conditions. Beginning
500-1000 ms after verb onset (well before the onset of the PP
containing the target), recipients attracted more looks than
instruments and locations. Thus, I found effects of
argument structure on both looks to the sentential subject and
looks to the target noun. In contrast, there were no
effects of typicality. Looks to plausible recipients
("class") were neither faster nor longer than looks to
implausible recipients ("fireman"). Note that outside the
context of books and teachers "firemen" are good recipients of an
assignment. However, the lack of typicality effects in the
instrument and location conditions as well suggests that
typicality effects may be task dependent.
These results demonstrate that argument structure,
rather than general conceptual knowledge, rapidly directed
listener attention to relevant aspects of a visual scene.
Example Stimuli
(typical target listed first)
Dative/Recipient: The book was challenging, so the
teacher assigned it as homework to the class/firemen.
Action/Instrument: A broken pipe was flooding the
laundry room, so the plumber cut it precisely with a saw/an axe
Monday evening.
Intransitive/Location: The girl slept for a while
on the bed/bus this afternoon.
References
Altmann, G. T. M., & Kamide, Y. (1999).
Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain
of subsequent reference. Cognition, 73, 247-264.
Kamide, Y., Altmann, G. T. M., & Haywood, S.
(2001). Evidence for the time-course of
constraint-application during sentence processing in visual
contexts. The 14th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
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