Abstract
- Numerous studies of utterance mediated gaze in visual scenes have demonstrated that
sentence processing is not only incremental but also eager: During processing,
listeners form expectations about upcoming arguments and make anticipatory eye
movements to relevant displayed objects.
- In particular, selectional information from verbs has been shown to guide visual
attention to appropriate objects; upon hearing “the boy will eat”, listeners start looking
at edible objects even before they are mentioned [1, 2].
- While these studies provide valuable insights into semantic processing, it is not clear
whether anticipatory eye movements indeed reflect the purely linguistic activation of
likely arguments or whether these anticipatory processes are influenced by the
circumscribed visual context.
- We present a German cross-modal priming experiment in which we examined listeners
sensitivity to selectional restrictions between verbs and their object arguments.
