CiteULike: briordan's Kamide

Now you see it, now you don't: Mediating the mapping between language and the visual world

Gerry Altmann — 2008-02-18T22:05:56-00:00

(2004), pp. 347-386.

The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements

Yuki Kamide — 2005-07-10T06:31:09-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 49, No. 1. (July 2003), pp. 133-156.

Three eye-tracking experiments using the 'visual-world' paradigm are described that explore the basis by which thematic dependencies can be evaluated in advance of linguistic input that unambiguously signals those dependencies. Following Altmann and Kamide (1999), who found that selectional information conveyed by a verb can be used to anticipate an upcoming Theme, we attempt to draw here a more precise picture of the basis for such anticipatory processing. Our data from two studies in English and one in Japanese suggest that (a) verb-based information is not limited to anticipating the immediately following (grammatical) object, but can also anticipate later occurring objects (e.g., Goals), (b) in combination with information conveyed by the verb, a pre-verbal argument (Agent) can constrain the anticipation of a subsequent Theme, and (c) in a head-final construction such as that typically found in Japanese, both syntactic and semantic constraints extracted from pre-verbal arguments can enable the anticipation, in effect, of a further forthcoming argument in the absence of their head (the verb). We suggest that such processing is the hallmark of an incremental processor that is able to draw on different sources of information (some non-linguistic) at the earliest possible opportunity to establish the fullest possible interpretation of the input at each moment in time.

Incremental interpretation at verbs: restricting the domain of subsequent reference

Gerry Altmann — 2005-07-08T23:45:24-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 73, No. 3. (17 December 1999), pp. 247-264.

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they inspected a semi-realistic visual scene showing a boy, a cake, and various distractor objects. Whilst viewing this scene, they heard sentences such as 'the boy will move the cake' or 'the boy will eat the cake'. The cake was the only edible object portrayed in the scene. In each of two experiments, the onset of saccadic eye movements to the target object (the cake) was significantly later in the move condition than in the eat condition; saccades to the target were launched after the onset of the spoken word cake in the move condition, but before its onset in the eat condition. The results suggest that information at the verb can be used to restrict the domain within the context to which subsequent reference will be made by the (as yet unencountered) post-verbal grammatical object. The data support a hypothesis in which sentence processing is driven by the predictive relationships between verbs, their syntactic arguments, and the real-world contexts in which they occur.

The real-time mediation of visual attention by language and world knowledge: Linking anticipatory (and other) eye movements to linguistic processing

Gerry Altmann — 2007-10-05T02:26:49-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 57, No. 4. (November 2007), pp. 502-518.

Two experiments explored the representational basis for anticipatory eye movements. Participants heard `the man will drink ...' or `the man has drunk ...' (Experiment 1) or `the man will drink all of ...' or `the man has drunk all of ...' (Experiment 2). They viewed a concurrent scene depicting a full glass of beer and an empty wine glass (amongst other things). There were more saccades towards the empty wine glass in the past tensed conditions than in the future tense conditions; the converse pattern obtained for looks towards the full glass of beer. We argue that these anticipatory eye movements reflect sensitivity to objects' affordances, and develop an account of the linkage between language processing and visual attention that can account not only for looks towards named objects, but also for those cases (including anticipatory eye movements) where attention is directed towards objects that are not being named.