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Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
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Published on: November 30, 2018

Event-based plausibility immediately influences on-line language comprehension.

Kazunaga Matsuki1, Tracy Chow, Mary Hare

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. kmatsuki@uwo.ca

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Event knowledge rapidly influences language comprehension, even without lexical violations. This study shows how combining concepts like instruments and actions impacts understanding of subsequent words in sentences.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Theories of sentence comprehension often prioritize lexical knowledge, like selectional restrictions, in processing.
  • The role of broader event knowledge in real-time language understanding remains an active area of investigation.
  • Previous research suggests instruments can influence verb and patient processing, but the underlying mechanisms require further clarification.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether conceptual event knowledge rapidly influences language comprehension.
  • To determine if combining instrument and action concepts affects the processing of subsequent patient nouns.
  • To examine if these effects occur independently of selectional restriction violations.

Main Methods:

  • Creation of instrument-verb-patient triplets through a norming study to assess event knowledge.
  • Experiment 1: Self-paced reading task to measure reading times for patient nouns.
  • Experiment 2: Controlled for direct instrument-patient relationships.
  • Experiment 3: Eyetracking study to analyze fixation durations and gaze patterns on patient nouns.

Main Results:

  • Participants exhibited faster reading times for typical instrument-action-patient combinations (e.g., shampoo-wash-hair).
  • Effects were observed in reading times and eye movement metrics (first fixation, gaze duration) on patient nouns.
  • Results were not attributable to direct instrument-patient semantic overlap.

Conclusions:

  • Conceptual event-based expectations are computed and utilized dynamically during online language comprehension.
  • This rapid integration of event knowledge influences sentence processing, supporting its significant role.
  • Selectional restrictions may represent a facet of broader event-based conceptual knowledge rather than purely lexical-grammatical constraints.