Joergensen, G. & Altmann, G. T.
University of York
It is generally accepted that prediction plays a fundamental role during language comprehension (as well as during language production and indeed, cognition more generally). Here, we discuss some of the constraints on the predictive process afforded by visual contexts (past and present). A range of studies suggests that when a sentence unfolds in the context of a concurrent scene, the predictions that are generated as the sentence unfolds reflect the structure of the event described by the sentence. Moreover, those predictions reflect an underlying assumption that the participants in the event will be drawn from the concurrent context, with the more plausible participants attracting more attention than the less plausible participants. In a series of eye-tracking studies we explored the role of plausibility in the generation of such predictions, and the manner in which the scene constrained those predictions. Surprisingly, we found that removing the visual scene immediately prior to the unfolding language appeared to remove the assumption that participants in the event would be drawn from the visual context (even though the critical manipulation was simply whether the scene was concurrent, or preceded the language by a few seconds). The data constrain accounts of sentence comprehension by placing limits on the nature of the predictive process in different contexts, and on the role of experience in modulating contextual constraint. The data have implications also for the relationship between the predictive processes that result in the activation of representations anticipating future language input, and the integrative processes that map actual language input onto those previously activated representations.