What’s next? Sufficiency of subject-object plausibility for anticipatory eye movements

Visual-world studies have shown that listeners can combine verb restrictions and case information with world knowledge to anticipate upcoming arguments (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999; Kamide, Scheepers, & Altmann, 2003). Kamide, Altmann, & Heywood (2003; Experiment 3) further demonstrated that anticipation does not depend on main verbs but can also be driven by the combination of nominative and dative-marked NPs. In their study, a dative NP2 implicated a subsequent transferable THEME object. Unlike dative NPs, nominative NPs only weakly constrain dependencies amongst remaining objects

The influence of stimulus preview on phonological competition: Evidence from synonyms in language comprehension

In visual-world experiments, stimulus pictures and names are sometimes introduced in preview sessions. To determine whether preview influences subsequent phonological competition, we paired, in a German study, target pictures (glider, 'Segelflugzeug') with competitor pictures with two synonymous names (pirate, 'Pirat' and 'Seeräuber') and two unrelated distractor pictures. Preview either introduced pictures and their subordinate names or just pictures. If subordinate names ('Seeräuber') of competitor pictures are automatically activated during spoken-word recognition, we predicted more looks to competitor than to distractor pictures due to phonological similarity with the target, even when subordinate names were not previewed. If, however, preview modulates the availability of subordinate names, either by inhibiting dominant names or by priming subordinate names, the magnitude of the competition should vary with preview. In two experiments, we found that subordinate names competed with target names even without preview, although previewing subordinate names modulated the magnitude of the competition

The mapping of phonetic information to lexical presentations in Spanish: Evidence from eye movements

In a visual-world study, we examined spoken-wordrecognition in Spanish. Spanish listeners followed spoken instructions to click on pictures while their eye movements were monitored. When instructed to click on the picture of a door (puerta), they experienced interference from the picture of a pig (p u e r c o ). The same interference from phonologically related items was observed when the displays contained printed names or a combination of pictures with their names printed underneath, although the effect was strongest for displays with printed names. Implications of the finding that the interference effect can be induced with standard pictorial displays as well as with orthographic displays are discussed