Psycholinguists have commonly assumed that as a spoken linguistic message unfolds over time, it is initially structured by a syntactic processing module that is encapsulated from information provided by other perceptual and cognitive systems. To test the effects of relevant visual context on the rapid mental processes that accompany spoken language comprehension, eye movements were recorded with a head-mounted eye-tracking system while subjects followed instructions to manipulate real objects. Visual context influenced spoken word recognition and mediated syntactic processing, even during the earliest moments of language processing.

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When listeners follow spoken instructions to manipulate real objects, their eye movements to the objects are closely time locked to the referring words. We review five experiments showing that this time-locked characteristic of eye movements provides a detailed profile of the processes that underlie real-time spoken language comprehension. Together, the first four experiments showed that listeners immediately integrated lexical, sublexical, and prosodic information in the spoken input with information from the visual context to reduce the set of referents to the intended one. The fifth experiment demonstrated that a visual referential context affected the initial structuring of the linguistic input, eliminating even strong syntactic preferences that result in clear garden paths when the referential context is introduced linguistically. We argue that context affected the earliest moments of language processing because it was highly accessible and relevant to the behavioral goals of the listener.

This article examines how certain types of semantic and discourse context affect the processing of relative clauses which are temporarily ambiguous between a relative clause and a main clause (e.g., "The actress selected by the director..."). We review recent results investigating local semantic context and temporal context, and we present some new data investigating referential contexts. The set of studies demonstrate that, contrary to many recent claims in the literature, all of these types of context can have early effects on syntactic ambiguity resolution during on-line reading comprehension. These results are discussed within a "constraint-based" framework for ambiguity resolution in which effects of context are determined by the strength and relevance of the contextual constraint and by the availability of the syntactic alternatives. Resume Le present article porte sur les effets qu'ont certains types de contextes semantiques et propres au discours sur le traitement de propositions relatives qui sont temporairement ambigues (p. ex. «Jhe actress selected by the director...»). Nous examinons les resultats obtenus recemment au sujet du contexte semantiquc et du contexte temporel et nous presentons de nouvelles donnees sur les contextes referentiels. II ressort de la serie d'6tudes que, contrairement k maintes affirmations recentes dans la litterature, tous ces types de contextes peuvent influer des le debut sur la resolution d'ambiguit6s syntaxiques pendant la lecture en temps reel. Les resultats sont traites selon un cadre base sur des contraintes pour la rdsolution d'ambiguitds, dans lequel les effets contextuels sont d6termin6s par la force et la pertinence des contraintes liees au contexte ainsi que par la presence de choix syntaxiques. Language comprehension takes place rapidly and, to a first approximation, incrementally. As the linguistic input is received, readers and listeners update representations that take into account information from the sentence and information from the discourse (Marslen-Wilson, 1973). The on-line nature of comprehension has important consequences for syntactic processing. First,