Comparison of different analysis methods

In this paper, we discuss key characteristics and typical experimental designs of the visual-world paradigm and compare different methods of analysing eye-movement data. We discuss the nature of the eye-movement data from a visual-world study and provide data analysis tutorials on ANOVA, t-tests, linear mixed-effects model, growth curve analysis, cluster-based permutation analysis, bootstrapped differences of timeseries, generalised additive modelling, and divergence point analysis to enable psycholinguists to apply each analytical method to their own data. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of each method and offer recommendations about how to select an appropriate method depending on the research question and the experimental design.Peer Reviewe

Can speaker gaze modulate syntactic structuring and thematic role assignment during spoken sentence comprehension?

Knoeferle P, Kreysa H. Can speaker gaze modulate syntactic structuring and thematic role assignment during spoken sentence comprehension? Frontiers in Psychology. 2012;3:538.During comprehension, a listener can rapidly follow a frontally seated speaker’s gaze to an object before its mention, a behavior which can shorten latencies in speeded sentence verification. However, the robustness of gaze-following, its interaction with core comprehension processes such as syntactic structuring, and the persistence of its effects are unclear. In two “visual-world” eye-tracking experiments participants watched a video of a speaker, seated at an angle, describing transitive (non-depicted) actions between two of three Second Life characters on a computer screen. Sentences were in German and had either subjectNP1-verb-objectNP2 or objectNP1-verb-subjectNP2 structure; the speaker either shifted gaze to the NP2 character or was obscured. Several seconds later, participants verified either the sentence referents or their role relations. When participants had seen the speaker’s gaze shift, they anticipated the NP2 character before its mention and earlier than when the speaker was obscured. This effect was more pronounced for SVO than OVS sentences in both tasks. Interactions of speaker gaze and sentence structure were more pervasive in role-relations verification: participants verified the role relations faster for SVO than OVS sentences, and faster when they had seen the speaker shift gaze than when the speaker was obscured. When sentence and template role-relations matched, gaze-following even eliminated the SVO-OVS response-time differences. Thus, gaze-following is robust even when the speaker is seated at an angle to the listener; it varies depending on the syntactic structure and thematic role relations conveyed by a sentence; and its effects can extend to delayed post-sentence comprehension processes. These results suggest that speaker gaze effects contribute pervasively to visual attention and comprehension processes and should thus be accommodated by accounts of situated language comprehension

Causal inference: relating language to event representations and events in the world

Events are not isolated but rather linked to one another in various dimensions. In language processing, various sources of information—including real-world knowledge, (representations of) current linguistic input and non-linguistic visual context—help establish causal connections between events. In this review, we discuss causal inference in relation to events and event knowledge as one aspect of world knowledge, and their representations in language comprehension. To evaluate the mechanism and time course of causal inference, we gather insights from studies on (1) implicit causality/consequentiality as a specific form of causal inference regarding the protagonists of cause/consequence events, and (2) the processing of causal relations. We highlight the importance of methodology in measuring causal inference, compare the results from different research methods, and emphasize the contribution of the visual-world paradigm to achieve a better understanding of causal inference. We recommend that further investigations of causal inference consider temporally sensitive measures and more detailed contexts

The influence of social factors

The semantic relation between a verb and its argument rapidly impacts language comprehension much like world knowledge and the linguistic context (Altmann & Kamide 1999, Golden & Rumelhart 1993, Kutas & Hillyard 1984). Considering this, the social information that becomes available within a communicative situation could also be considered to belong to the contextual information that language users draw on during comprehension. In the present study, social information is established via matching and mismatching relations between the formality of a context and the use of formal or informal register. In two self-paced reading experiments with an additional picture-selection task we examined how the semantic relation between a verb and its argument may interact with congruence relations between formality contexts and register. We assessed whether comprehenders benefit from habituation enabled by presentation of the stimuli in formality blocks (Exp 1, N = 66) and whether they can rapidly adapt to changes in situation formality (Exp 2, N = 64). We successfully replicated incremental verb-argument (mis)match effects. No significant register-congruence effect was found, but the observed picture-selection accuracy patterns could be taken to suggest that the processing of social contextual information might impact late sentence processing. To gain an understanding of the variability found across all dependent measures and experiments we discuss these effects in the context of social background factors such as a participant’s educational background and currently-used language variants.Peer Reviewe

The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy

Accessibility of Depicted Events Influences Their Priority in Spoken Comprehension

Knoeferle P, Crocker M. Accessibility of depicted events influences their priority in spoken comprehension. In: Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 2006: 1623-1628.Studies that monitor attention in depicted event scenes during utterance comprehension show that people prefer to rely on depicted events rather than their stereotypical knowledge. However, the presence of depicted events in the scene may have exaggerated their importance. Two eye-tracking experiments examined this issue by varying the accessibility of scene information. When we varied the visual presence of the scene (the scene disappeared before the utterance was heard), findings confirmed a greater relative priority of depicted events (Experiment 1). In contrast, when we altered the temporal extension of scene events (scene presentation emulated that they had been completed), people neither had a preference to rely on depicted events nor on their stereotypical knowledge (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that the visual presence of scene events cannot account for the preference to rely on depicted events. We discuss our findings in the context of research on the accessibility of events in discourse comprehension (e.g., Zwaan, Maaden, & Whitten, 2000)

Editorial: Socially Situated? Effects of Social and Cultural Context on Language Processing and Learning

Peer Reviewe

Conflicting constraints in resource-adaptive language comprehension

The primary goal of psycholinguistic research is to understand the architectures and mechanisms that underlie human language comprehension and production. This entails an understanding of how linguistic knowledge is represented and organized in the brain and a theory of how that knowledge is accessed when we use language. Research has traditionally emphasized purely linguistic aspects of on-line comprehension, such as the influence of lexical, syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints, and their tim -course. It has become increasingly clear, however, that nonlinguistic information, such as the visual environment, are also actively exploited by situated language comprehenders