Register and morphosyntactic congruence during sentence processing in German: An eye-tracking study.

In the present study, we used eye-tracking to investigate formality-register and morphosyntactic congruence during sentence reading. While research frequently covers participants' processing of lexical, (morpho-)syntactic, or semantic knowledge (e.g.

Causal inference: relating language to event representations and events in the world.

Events are not isolated but rather linked to one another in various dimensions. In language processing, various sources of information-including real-world knowledge, (representations of) current linguistic input and non-linguistic visual context-help establish causal connections between events. In this review, we discuss causal inference in relation to events and event knowledge as one aspect of world knowledge, and their representations in language comprehension.

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods.

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center "Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation" (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define "register" as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register.

Analysing data from the psycholinguistic visual-world paradigm: Comparison of different analysis methods.

In this paper, we discuss key characteristics and typical experimental designs of the visual-world paradigm and compare different methods of analysing eye-movement data. We discuss the nature of the eye-movement data from a visual-world study and provide data analysis tutorials on ANOVA, t-tests, linear mixed-effects model, growth curve analysis, cluster-based permutation analysis, bootstrapped differences of timeseries, generalised additive modelling, and divergence point analysis to enable psycholinguists to apply each analytical method to their own data. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of each method and offer recommendations about how to select an appropriate method depending on the research question and the experimental design.

Influence of Actor's Congruent and Incongruent Gaze on Language Processing.

In interpreting spoken sentences in event contexts, comprehenders both integrate their current interpretation of language with the recent past (e.g., events they have witnessed) and develop expectations about future event possibilities.

Integration of Social Context vs. Linguistic Reference During Situated Language Processing.

Research findings on language comprehension suggest that many kinds of non-linguistic cues can rapidly affect language processing. Extant processing accounts of situated language comprehension model these rapid effects and are only beginning to accommodate the role of non-linguistic emotional, cues. To begin with a detailed characterization of distinct cues and their relative effects, three visual-world eye-tracking experiments assessed the relative importance of two cue types (action depictions vs.

Grounding Language Processing: The Added Value of Specifying Linguistic/Compositional Representations and Processes.

Abundant empirical evidence suggests that visual perception and motor responses are involved in language comprehension ('grounding'). However, when modeling the grounding of sentence comprehension on a word-by-word basis, linguistic representations and cognitive processes are rarely made fully explicit. This article reviews representational formalisms and associated (computational) models with a view to accommodating incremental and compositional grounding effects.

The Role of Literal Features During Processing of Novel Verbal Metaphors.

When a word is used metaphorically (for example "walrus" in the sentence "The president is a walrus"), some features of that word's meaning ("very fat," "slow-moving") are carried across to the metaphoric interpretation while other features ("has large tusks," "lives near the north pole") are not. What happens to these features that relate only to the literal meaning during processing of novel metaphors? In four experiments, the present study examined the role of the feature of physical containment during processing of verbs of physical containment. That feature is used metaphorically to signify difficulty, such as "fenced in" in the sentence "the journalist's opinion was fenced in after the change in regime.

Referential vs. Non-referential World-Language Relations: How Do They Modulate Language Comprehension in 4 to 5-Year-Olds, Younger, and Older Adults?

Age has been shown to influence language comprehension, with delays, for instance, in older adults' expectations about upcoming information. We examined to what extent expectations about upcoming event information (who-does-what-to-whom) change across the lifespan (in 4- to 5-year-old children, younger, and older adults) and as a function of different world-language relations. In a visual-world paradigm, participants in all three age groups inspected a speaker whose facial expression was either smiling or sad.

Anticipating a future versus integrating a recent event? Evidence from eye-tracking.

When comprehending a spoken sentence that refers to a visually-presented event, comprehenders both integrate their current interpretation of language with the recent event and develop expectations about future event possibilities. Tense cues can disambiguate this linking, but temporary ambiguity in these cues may lead comprehenders to also rely on further, experience-based (e.g.

Does direction matter? Linguistic asymmetries reflected in visual attention.

Language and vision interact in non-trivial ways. Linguistically, spatial utterances are often asymmetrical as they relate more stable objects (reference objects) to less stable objects (located objects). Researchers have claimed that such linguistic asymmetry should also be reflected in the allocation of visual attention when people process a depicted spatial relation described by spatial language.

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

The present work is a description and an assessment of a methodology designed to quantify different aspects of the interaction between language processing and the perception of the visual world. The recording of eye-gaze patterns has provided good evidence for the contribution of both the visual context and linguistic/world knowledge to language comprehension. Initial research assessed object-context effects to test theories of modularity in language processing.

Corrigendum: Semantic Interference and Facilitation: Understanding the Integration of Spatial Distance and Conceptual Similarity During Sentence Reading.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.

Semantic Interference and Facilitation: Understanding the Integration of Spatial Distance and Conceptual Similarity During Sentence Reading.

Existing evidence has shown a processing advantage (or facilitation) when representations derived from a non-linguistic context (spatial proximity depicted by gambling cards moving together) match the semantic content of an ensuing sentence. A match, inspired by conceptual metaphors such as 'similarity is closeness' would, for instance, involve cards moving closer together and the sentence relates similarity between abstract concepts such as war and battle. However, other studies have reported a disadvantage (or interference) for congruence between the semantic content of a sentence and representations of spatial distance derived from this sort of non-linguistic context.

Distinct effects of different visual cues on sentence comprehension and later recall: The case of speaker gaze versus depicted actions.

Language-processing accounts are beginning to accommodate different visual context effects, but they remain underspecified regarding differences between cues, both during sentence comprehension and subsequent recall. We monitored participants' eye movements to mentioned characters while they listened to transitive sentences. We varied whether speaker gaze, a depicted action, neither, or both of these visual cues were available, as well as whether both cues were deictic (Experiment 1) or only speaker gaze (Experiment 2).

Extending Situated Language Comprehension (Accounts) with Speaker and Comprehender Characteristics: Toward Socially Situated Interpretation.

More and more findings suggest a tight temporal coupling between (non-linguistic) socially interpreted context and language processing. Still, real-time language processing accounts remain largely elusive with respect to the influence of biological (e.g.

Multisensory brand search: How the meaning of sounds guides consumers' visual attention.

Building on models of crossmodal attention, the present research proposes that brand search is inherently multisensory, in that the consumers' visual search for a specific brand can be facilitated by semantically related stimuli that are presented in another sensory modality. A series of 5 experiments demonstrates that the presentation of spatially nonpredictive auditory stimuli associated with products (e.g.

Visual attention during spatial language comprehension.

Spatial terms such as "above", "in front of", and "on the left of" are all essential for describing the location of one object relative to another object in everyday communication. Apprehending such spatial relations involves relating linguistic to object representations by means of attention. This requires at least one attentional shift, and models such as the Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) predict the direction of that attention shift, from the sausage to the box for spatial utterances such as "The box is above the sausage".

Different mechanisms for role relations versus verb-action congruence effects: evidence from ERPs in picture-sentence verification.

Extant accounts of visually situated language processing do make general predictions about visual context effects on incremental sentence comprehension; these, however, are not sufficiently detailed to accommodate potentially different visual context effects (such as a scene-sentence mismatch based on actions versus thematic role relations, e.g., (Altmann & Kamide, 2007; Knoeferle & Crocker, 2007; Taylor & Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)).

Spatial distance effects on incremental semantic interpretation of abstract sentences: evidence from eye tracking.

A large body of evidence has shown that visual context information can rapidly modulate language comprehension for concrete sentences and when it is mediated by a referential or a lexical-semantic link. What has not yet been examined is whether visual context can also modulate comprehension of abstract sentences incrementally when it is neither referenced by, nor lexically associated with, the sentence. Three eye-tracking reading experiments examined the effects of spatial distance between words (Experiment 1) and objects (Experiment 2 and 3) on participants' reading times for sentences that convey similarity or difference between two abstract nouns (e.

Effects of speaker emotional facial expression and listener age on incremental sentence processing.

We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated how and with which time course emotional information from a speaker's face affects younger (N = 32, Mean age  = 23) and older (N = 32, Mean age  = 64) listeners' visual attention and language comprehension as they processed emotional sentences in a visual context. The age manipulation tested predictions by socio-emotional selectivity theory of a positivity effect in older adults. After viewing the emotional face of a speaker (happy or sad) on a computer display, participants were presented simultaneously with two pictures depicting opposite-valence events (positive and negative; IAPS database) while they listened to a sentence referring to one of the events.

Can Speaker Gaze Modulate Syntactic Structuring and Thematic Role Assignment during Spoken Sentence Comprehension?

During comprehension, a listener can rapidly follow a frontally seated speaker's gaze to an object before its mention, a behavior which can shorten latencies in speeded sentence verification. However, the robustness of gaze-following, its interaction with core comprehension processes such as syntactic structuring, and the persistence of its effects are unclear. In two "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments participants watched a video of a speaker, seated at an angle, describing transitive (non-depicted) actions between two of three Second Life characters on a computer screen.

Preferential Inspection of Recent Real-World Events Over Future Events: Evidence from Eye Tracking during Spoken Sentence Comprehension.

Eye-tracking findings suggest people prefer to ground their spoken language comprehension by focusing on recently seen events more than anticipating future events: When the verb in NP1-VERB-ADV-NP2 sentences was referentially ambiguous between a recently depicted and an equally plausible future clipart action, listeners fixated the target of the recent action more often at the verb than the object that hadn't yet been acted upon. We examined whether this inspection preference generalizes to real-world events, and whether it is (vs. isn't) modulated by how often people see recent and future events acted out.