Knoeferle, P.
Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC), Bielefeld, Germany.
When people listened to a sentence that could either refer to a clipart event they had recently seen, or to another, future, event, they preferred to look more at the recent event target. We examined whether this inspection preference also holds for real-world events, and whether it is sensitive to how often people see recent (vs. future) events. In a first study, we observed the same inspection preference with real-world events. When people saw a real-world action and heard a sentence (verb) that was temporarily ambiguous between that recent action versus an equally plausible future action, they immediately looked more often at the target of the recent (vs. the other, future) action event. However, since none of the future events were acted out, this inspection preference could reflect a frequency bias. Alternatively, it could index a preferred grounding of verbs in performed actions. In a subsequent study, the experimenter performed equally many future and recent actions. A corpus study ensured the verbs and adverbs in our sentences (indicating past versus future actions) were equally frequent. Notwithstanding, when recent and future actions (and corresponding verbs) were equally frequent and predictive, listeners still initially preferred to look more at the recent than the future event target during sentence comprehension. Thus, recent real-world actions can rapidly influence comprehension, and even when recent and future actions and corresponding verbs / adverbs do not bias towards the recent past, people preferred to inspect recent (vs. future) events. A simple frequency-of-experience account cannot accommodate these findings.