PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Eye tracking results suggest that people prefer to rely upon recently depicted (vs. possible future) clipart events during spoken sentence comprehension: When the verb in NP1- VERB-ADV-NP2 sentences was referentially ambiguous between a recently performed action and an equally plausible future action, people more frequently inspected the recently acted upon object during the verb (vs. an equally plausible object that hadn't yet been acted upon, Knoeferle & Crocker, 2007). Two real-world eye-tracking studies examined to which extent these findings generalize. Experiment 1 replicated them with real-world actions: A recently acted upon object (pancakes) was inspected more often than the equally plausible target of a future action (strawberries) during and shortly after participants had heard the verb. Experiment 2 had the same design but (unlike Experiment 1) the experimenter performed an action both before (e.g., sugaring the pancakes) and after (e.g., sugaring the strawberries) each trial. Each participant thus saw the “future” and the “past” action of the sentence 50 / 50. The gaze pattern in Experiment 2 was not distinguishable from that in Experiment 1. These findings suggest (a) recent real-world actions can rapidly influence comprehension (as indexed by gaze to relevant objects), and (b) people prefer to direct their attention towards a recent action target (vs. an object that will be acted upon in the near future), even when past and future actions occurred with equal frequency. Recent within-experiment frequency apparently didn’t modulate the preference to inspect the target of a past event (vs. the target of a future event).