Figure 3 - uploaded by Glenn Williams
Content may be subject to copyright.
Example visual array paired with spoken discourses (e.g. (5) -(8)) in Experiment 2 Visual displays were paired with pre-recorded spoken discourses, such as those outlined in (5) -(8) below.
Source publication
Recent research highlights the influence of (e.g., task) context on conceptual retrieval. To assess whether conceptual representations are context-dependent rather than static, we investigated the influence of spatial narrative context on accessibility for lexical-semantic information by exploring competition effects. In two visual world experiment...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... visual competition, which relies on the visual aspects of a word, may not be subject to spatiotemporal discourse context effects in the same way as other competition effects (i.e. that do not draw on the visual aspects of a word, as in Experiment 1) in the context of the visual world paradigm. To test whether non-visual information, i.e. discourse context, can modulate competition for visual features in the visual world paradigm, in Experiment 2 we used a similar methodology to that employed in Experiment 1, but we replaced the semantic competitors with visual competitors (see Figure 3). ...
Context 2
... for this experiment all images were presented in greyscale to eliminate any overlap in colour between items such that visual similarity would primarily be determined by visual shape. Thus, we created 32 experimental visual displays such as that depicted in Figure 3. Each visual display contained 4 (greyscale) inanimate objects that were phonologically distinct (i.e. with no rhyme or cohort names), two of which (i.e. the target and competitor) were visually similar to one another. ...
Citations
... Beyond the question of pronoun interpretation, the results are compatible with findings showing that listeners and speakers spontaneously update mental representations based on past events, and that referential expressions are interpreted relative to these dynamic representations (see, e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 2007;Chambers & San Juan, 2008;Ibarra & Tanenhaus, 2016;Kukona et al., 2014;Williams, Kukona, & Kamide, 2019). It is also interesting to note the connection between these (and our) findings and work in visual cognition, where the indexical pointers used for tracking entities (e.g., Pylyshyn, 1989) may be separable from the information associated with these entities in working memory (Thyer et al., 2022). ...
Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of retrieval, whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither necessary nor sufficient for interpreting a pronoun, and even when an antecedent has been introduced in earlier discourse, there is little evidence for the retrieval of linguistic form. The current study extends our understanding of pronoun interpretation by examining whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved from representations of past discourse. Participants were instructed to move displayed objects in a Visual World eye-tracking task. In some cases, the semantics of the antecedent were no longer viable after an instruction was completed (e.g., "Move the house on the left to area 12," where the result was that a different house is now the leftmost one). In this case, retrieving antecedent semantics at the point of hearing a subsequent pronoun ("Now, move it…") should entail a processing penalty. Instead, the results showed that antecedent semantics have no direct effect on interpretation, raising additional questions about the role that retrieval might play in pronoun interpretation.
... We selected the time window of a critical word +200 ms since previous studies have demonstrated that the competition effects of related objects were observed around 200-300 ms after the onset of the target word (e.g., Huettig and Altmann, 2005;Yee and Sedivy, 2006). We transformed the proportion of fixations for each time window using the arcsine square root transformation to account for the bounded nature of binomial responses (e.g., Williams et al., 2019). We then fit linear mixed models for data of each time window using the lmer function in the lme4 package (Bates et al., 2015) of R (R Core Team, 2020). ...
The present “visual world” eye-tracking study examined the time-course of how native and non-native speakers keep track of implied object-state representations during real-time language processing. Fifty-two native speakers of English and 46 non-native speakers with advanced English proficiency joined this study. They heard short stories describing a target object (e.g., an onion) either having undergone a substantial change-of-state (e.g., chop the onion) or a minimal change-of-state (e.g., weigh the onion) while their eye movements toward competing object-states (e.g., a chopped onion vs. an intact onion) and two unrelated distractors were tracked. We found that both groups successfully directed their visual attention toward the end-state of the target object that was implied in the linguistic context. However, neither group showed anticipatory eye movements toward the implied object-state when hearing the critical verb (e.g., “weigh/chop”). Only native English speakers but not non-native speakers showed a bias in visual attention during the determiner (“the”) before the noun (e.g., “onion”). Our results suggested that although native and non-native speakers of English largely overlapped in their time-courses of keeping track of object-state representations during real-time language comprehension, non-native speakers showed a short delay in updating the implied object-state representations.
... Bear said that Miss Duckie chased him with a knife." With a discourse context about a robber, the comprehender might be more likely to interpret the pronoun as referring to the robber (as opposed to Mr. Bear) than if the discourse context had involved, say, a neighbor (depending on one's neighbors; Järvikivi, van Gompel, & Hyönä, 2017;Kaiser, Runner, Sussman, & Tanenhaus, 2009;Koornneef & Sanders, 2013;Williams, Kukona, & Kamide, 2019). Given that neither gaps nor pronouns contain much semantic information and the two do not differ in pragmatic content in any clear way, we think it is unlikely that the use of a gap vs. resumptive pronoun would interact with pragmatic interpretation in such an extreme way. ...
Language comprehension and production are generally assumed to use the same representations, but resumption poses a problem for this view: This structure is regularly produced, but judged highly unacceptable. Production-based solutions to this paradox explain resumption in terms of processing pressures, whereas the Facilitation Hypothesis suggests resumption is produced to help listeners comprehend. Previous research purported to support the Facilitation Hypothesis did not test its keystone prediction: that resumption improves accuracy of interpretation. Here, we test this prediction directly, controlling for factors that previous work did not. Results show that resumption in fact hinders comprehension in the same sentences that native speakers produced, a finding which replicated across four high-powered experiments with varying paradigms: sentence-picture matching (N=300), self-paced reading (N=96), visual world eye-tracking (N=96), and multiple-choice comprehension question (N=150). These findings are consistent with production-based accounts, indicating that comprehension and production may indeed share representations, although our findings point toward a limit on the degree of overlap. Methodologically speaking, the findings highlight the importance of measuring interpretation when studying comprehension.
... Relatedly, while the ratings of associated sounds were counterbalanced across competitors and distractors, suggesting that competitors were not fixated simply because they were more likely to have associated sounds than distractors, the current results reflect a (e.g., task) context in which non-targets often had associated sounds. Thus, another potential issue for future research is to consider whether participants can strategically suppress semantic competition effects in contexts in which non-targets never have associated sounds, paralleling other context-based effects in the linguistic domain (e.g., Williams, Kukona, & Kamide, 2019;Yee & Thompson-Schill, 2016). In summary, in much the same way that the growing body of psycholinguistic research on semantic competition effects has yielded a wide range of insights, the current results lay the foundation for exploring a wide range of issues with environmental sounds. ...
Two visual world experiments investigated the activation of semantically related concepts during the processing of environmental sounds and spoken words. Participants heard environmental sounds such as barking or spoken words such as “puppy” while viewing visual arrays with objects such as a bone (semantically related competitor) and candle (unrelated distractor). In Experiment 1, a puppy (target) was also included in the visual array; in Experiment 2, it was not. During both types of auditory stimuli, competitors were fixated significantly more than distractors, supporting the coactivation of semantically related concepts in both cases; comparisons of the two types of auditory stimuli also revealed significantly larger effects with environmental sounds than spoken words. We discuss implications of these results for theories of semantic knowledge.
