To Dash or to Dawdle: Verb-Associated Speed of Motion Influences Eye Movements during Spoken Sentence Comprehension

Shane Lindsay, Christoph Scheepers and Yuki Kamide

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 6, 1-11

Abstract: In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast (“dash”) or slow (“dawdle”) movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal and less on the path. These results reveal that event comprehension in the presence of a visual world involves establishing and dynamically updating the locations of entities in response to linguistic descriptions of events.

Date: 2013
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0067187

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0067187

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