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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 18, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Published on: November 30, 2018

Animacy-based predictions in language comprehension are robust: contextual cues modulate but do not nullify them.

R Muralikrishnan¹, Matthias Schlesewsky², Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky³

¹Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Grueneburgweg 14, 60322 Frankfurt, Germany; Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.

|January 27, 2015

Summary

The brain prefers animate entities as event instigators, influencing language comprehension. Even with context, this animacy preference in processing sentences remains strong.

Keywords:

Actor Animacy Contextual cues ERPs Predictive processing Sentence processing Tamil

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Psycholinguistics
Computational Linguistics

Background:

Human cognition often assumes animate entities are primary agents in events.
This animacy bias influences both event perception and language processing.
Understanding these biases is crucial for models of language comprehension.

Purpose of the Study:

Investigate the role of animacy in real-time sentence processing.
Examine how animacy preferences interact with contextual information.
Determine the cross-linguistic robustness of animacy-based predictions.

Main Methods:

Utilized auditory event-related brain potential (ERP) studies in Tamil.
Measured ERPs to the second argument in transitive sentences.
Employed varied animacy combinations and novel contextual designs.

Main Results:

Observed an N400 effect when an expected animate Actor was replaced by an inanimate one.
Demonstrated that contextual cues can modulate but not eliminate this N400 effect.
Confirmed the significant impact of animacy preferences on language comprehension.

Conclusions:

Animacy-based predictions are a robust feature of online language comprehension.
These predictions appear stronger than contextual cues in guiding sentence processing.
Findings support the universal nature of animacy preferences across languages.