Visual context effects on situated language comprehension: Evidence from eye-tracking

Abashidze D. Visual context effects on situated language comprehension: Evidence from eye-tracking. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2017

The role of early linguistic cues in the recent event preference

Abashidze D, Chambers C. The role of early linguistic cues in the recent event preference. In: Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP). http://www.bcbl.eu/events/files/galeria/Book%20of%20abstracts%20AMLaP%202016.pdf; 2016

Do people prefer to inspect the target of a recent action?: The case of verb-action mismatches

Abashidze D, Knoeferle P. Do people prefer to inspect the target of a recent action?: The case of verb-action mismatches. Presented at the AMLaP 2015, Valletta, Malta

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. In a first eye-tracking study, the experimenter performed an action (e.g., sugaring pancakes), and then a spoken sentence either referred to that action or to an equally plausible future action (e.g., sugaring strawberries). At the verb, people more often inspected the pancakes (the recent target) than the strawberries (the future target), thus replicating the recent-event preference with these real-world actions. Adverb tense, indicating a future versus past event, had no effect on participants’ visual attention. In a second study we increased the frequency of future actions such that participants saw 50/50 future and recent actions. During the verb people mostly inspected the recent action target, but subsequently they began to rely on tense, and anticipated the future target more often for future than past tense adverbs. A corpus study showed that the verbs and adverbs indicating past versus future actions were equally frequent, suggesting long-term frequency biases did not cause the recent-event preference. Thus, (a) recent real-world actions can rapidly influence comprehension (as indexed by eye gaze to objects), and (b) people prefer to first inspect a recent action target (vs. an object that will soon be acted upon), even when past and future actions occur with equal frequency. A simple frequency-of-experience account cannot accommodate these findings

Eye-tracking situated language comprehension: Immediate actor gaze versus recent action events

Abashidze D, Knoeferle P, Carminati MN. Eye-tracking situated language comprehension: Immediate actor gaze versus recent action events. In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Pasadena, California, USA; 2015

HOW STRONG IS GAZE AGAINST THE RECENT EVENT PREFERENCE?

Abashidze D, Knoeferle P, Carminati MN. HOW STRONG IS GAZE AGAINST THE RECENT EVENT PREFERENCE? In: Presented at the AMLaP 2014. Edinburgh, Scotland: http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/AMLaP/documents/programme.pdf; 2014