Eye-tracking findings suggest people prefer to ground their spoken language comprehension by focusing on recently seen events more than anticipating future events: When the verb in NP1-VERB-ADV-NP2 sentences was referentially ambiguous between a recently depicted and an equally plausible future clipart action, listeners fixated the target of the recent action more often at the verb than the object that hadn’t yet been acted upon. We examined whether this inspection preference generalizes to real-world events, and whether it is (vs. isn’t) modulated by how often people see recent and future events acted out. In a first eye-tracking study, the experimenter performed an action (e.g., sugaring pancakes), and then a spoken sentence either referred to that action or to an equally plausible future action (e.g., sugaring strawberries). At the verb, people more often inspected the pancakes (the recent target) than the strawberries (the future target), thus replicating the recent-event preference with these real-world actions. Adverb tense, indicating a future versus past event, had no effect on participants’ visual attention. In a second study we increased the frequency of future actions such that participants saw 50/50 future and recent actions. During the verb people mostly inspected the recent action target, but subsequently they began to rely on tense, and anticipated the future target more often for future than past tense adverbs. A corpus study showed that the verbs and adverbs indicating past versus future actions were equally frequent, suggesting long-term frequency biases did not cause the recent-event preference. Thus, (a) recent real-world actions can rapidly influence comprehension (as indexed by eye gaze to objects), and (b) people prefer to first inspect a recent action target (vs. an object that will soon be acted upon), even when past and future actions occur with equal frequency. A simple frequency-of-experience account cannot accommodate these findings.
This research report examines the occurrence of listener visual cues during nonunderstanding episodes and investigates raters’ sensitivity to those cues. Nonunderstanding episodes (n = 21) and length-matched understanding episodes (n = 21) were taken from a larger dataset of video-recorded conversations between second language (L2) English speakers and a bilingual French-English interlocutor (McDonough, Trofimovich, Dao, & Abashidze, 2018). Episode videos were analyzed for the occurrence of listener visual cues, such as head nods, blinks, facial expressions, and holds. Videos of the listener’s face were manipulated to create three rating conditions: clear voice/clear face, distorted voice/clear face, and clear voice/blurred face. Raters in the same speech community (N = 66) were assigned to a video condition to assess the listener’s comprehension. Results revealed differences in the occurrence of listener visual cues between the understanding and nonunderstanding episodes. In addition, raters gave lower ratings of listener comprehension when they had access to the listener’s visual cues.
To confirm the role of social factors in mediating cognitive processes, this systematic replication study seeks to extend the generalizability of an exploratory study (McDonough, Crowther, Kielstra & Trofimovich 2015) that reported a positive association between eye gaze and second language (L2) speakers’ responses to recasts. For this replication, L2 English speakers (N = 74) carried out communicative tasks with research assistants who provided recasts in response to non-targetlike forms while both interlocutors’ eye gaze behavior was tracked. Transcripts were analyzed for the occurrence of recasts in response to different error types, recast length, and L2 speaker responses. Eye gaze length for the research assistants (RAs) when producing the recast move and the L2 speaker when responding to the recast were obtained in seconds, and mutual gaze (i.e., simultaneous looking) was included as a binary eye gaze variable. A logistic regression model confirmed the findings of McDonough et al. (2015), with both L2 speaker and mutual eye gaze predictive of targetlike responses; however, the effect of L2 speaker's eye gaze duration was in the opposite direction as compared to the initial study. The implications are discussed in terms of understanding the role of eye gaze in face to face interaction.
In interpreting spoken sentences in event contexts, comprehenders both integrate their current interpretation of language with the recent past (e.g., events they have witnessed) and develop expectations about future event possibilities. Tense cues can disambiguate this linking but temporary ambiguity in their interpretation may lead comprehenders to also rely on further, situation-specific cues (e.g., an actor's gaze as a cue to his future actions). How comprehenders reconcile these different cues in real time is an open issue that we must address to accommodate comprehension. It has been suggested that relating a referential expression (e.g., a verb) to a referent (e.g., a recent event) is preferred over relying on other cues that refer to the future and are not yet referentially grounded (“recent-event preference”). Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments compared this recent-event preference with effects of an actor's gaze and of tense/temporal adverbs as cues to a future action event. The results revealed that people overall preferred to focus on the recent (vs. future) event target in their interpretation, suggesting that while a congruent and incongruent actor gaze can jointly with futuric linguistic cues neutralize the recent-event preference late in the sentence, the latter still plays a key role in shaping participants' initial verb-based event interpretation. Additional post-experimental memory tests provided insight into the longevity of the gaze effects.
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