Anticipatory looks reveal expectations about discourse relations

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Prior research confirms expectation-driven processing at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels within sentences.
• Expectations regarding pragmatic relationships between sentences remain less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether comprehenders anticipate intersentential coherence relations, a key unit of discourse structure.
• To develop and employ a novel methodology for studying discourse-level prediction.

Main Methods:

• A novel eye-tracking paradigm was used, training participants to associate spatial locations with specific coherence relations.
• Experiment 1 tested if learned location-relation mappings predicted looking behavior in response to coherence-signaling connectives.
• Experiment 2 examined if verb-induced expectations influenced predictions about subsequent sentence types.

Main Results:

• Participants who successfully learned the location-relation associations looked to trained locations when encountering coherence-signaling connectives.
• Eye-tracking data indicated that listeners' looks revealed expectations about upcoming sentence types, influenced by coherence-biasing verbs.
• This demonstrates predictive processing at the discourse level.

Conclusions:

• Comprehenders form expectations about how sentences relate to each other, extending predictive processing beyond sentence-internal structure.
• The study introduces a new eye-tracking methodology for investigating discourse-level comprehension and prediction.
• Findings shed light on the cues listeners use to establish coherence in discourse.