Processing coordination ambiguity in the visual world: Frequency and context do not override the preference for syntactic simplicity

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Engelhardt ◽  
Fernanda Ferreira
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Pirita Pyykkönen ◽  
Juhani Järvikivi

A visual world eye-tracking study investigated the activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. We showed that people infer the implicit causality of verbs as soon as they encounter such verbs in discourse, as is predicted by proponents of the immediate focusing account ( Greene & McKoon, 1995 ; Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006 ; Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, & Nieuwland, 2007 ). Interestingly, we observed activation of implicit causality information even before people encountered the causal conjunction. However, while implicit causality information was persistent as the discourse unfolded, it did not have a privileged role as a focusing cue immediately at the ambiguous pronoun when people were resolving its antecedent. Instead, our study indicated that implicit causality does not affect all referents to the same extent, rather it interacts with other cues in the discourse, especially when one of the referents is already prominently in focus.


i-Perception ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 204166952098725
Author(s):  
Brian Rogers

In 1979, James Gibson completed his third and final book “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception”. That book can be seen as the synthesis of the many radical ideas he proposed over the previous 30 years – the concept of information and its sufficiency, the necessary link between perception and action, the need to see perception in relation to an animal's particular ecological niche and the meanings (affordances) offered by the visual world. One of the fundamental concepts that lies beyond all of Gibson's thinking is that of optic flow: the constantly changing patterns of light that reach our eyes and the information it provides. My purpose in writing this paper has been to evaluate the legacy of Gibson's conceptual ideas and to consider how his ideas have influenced and changed the way we study perception.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 222-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
EVAN KIDD ◽  
ANDREW J. STEWART ◽  
LUDOVICA SERRATRICE

ABSTRACTIn this paper we report on a visual world eye-tracking experiment that investigated the differing abilities of adults and children to use referential scene information during reanalysis to overcome lexical biases during sentence processing. The results showed that adults incorporated aspects of the referential scene into their parse as soon as it became apparent that a test sentence was syntactically ambiguous, suggesting they considered the two alternative analyses in parallel. In contrast, the children appeared not to reanalyze their initial analysis, even over shorter distances than have been investigated in prior research. We argue that this reflects the children's over-reliance on bottom-up, lexical cues to interpretation. The implications for the development of parsing routines are discussed.


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