Perspective reasoning and the real-time comprehension of spoken narrative: Insights from eye movements

Various aspects of communicative meaning hinge on issues of perspective, and key components of perspective reasoning are known to accompany real-time language comprehension. Drawing on the Visual World Paradigm, past studies have shown that listeners' ability to manage privileged knowledge about objects' existence or presence in a context is more effective than the ability to manage privileged knowledge about objects' identity. The present study tests the generalizability of these findings in a situation where listeners are processing spoken narratives. The central question is how effectively listeners manage privileged narrative- level information that should not be attributed to story characters. For example, when a character utters a referring expression, listeners' interpretation should not draw on information unknown to the character. Experiment 1 (off-line comprehension measures) demonstrates that listeners reliably encode and recall story characters' knowledge states. In contrast, Experiment 2 (real-time gaze measures) shows that, although listeners effectively manage privileged narrative knowledge about characters' existence during real-time comprehension, they are less effective when this privileged knowledge concerns characters' identity. Together the results validate and extend past findings and highlight connections to broader phenomena including referential opacity and qualitatively distinct forms of perspective-taking.