Eye-tracking research has revealed that people rely more on
a recently enacted action-event than consider a plausible future
action-event when hearing a sentence referring to a visual
scene. When participants encountered a recently enacted
action-event, and then listened to a (NP1-Verb-Adv-NP2) past
or futuric present tense sentence in German, they inspected the
target of the recently seen event more often than that of the
equally plausible future target shown, irrespective of sentence
tense. These preferential looks towards the recent target persisted
even when future events and futuric present sentences
were presented with greater frequency within the experiment.
The current experiments assessed whether the preferential
looks toward recent targets occur in similarly structured English
sentences containing earlier, more localized tense markers
(auxiliary verbs: will/has), and in Georgian sentences containing
an even earlier case marking at the first noun phrase
(nominative and ergative case). Can the early morphosyntactic
cues eliminate the preferential inspection of the recent target?
Results revealed that when participants processed the tense
marker in Experiment 1 (English) and 2 (Georgian), the bias
towards looking at the recent target was reduced. However, in
Georgian, the morphological marker on its own was not able to
eliminate the strength of the recent event. In both experiments,
participants rapidly started to decrease their looks towards the
recent target when exposed to the clear future tense cues at the
verbs and this gaze pattern continued into the later word regions.
This shows that participants were able to use the tense
cues but only partly use the morphosyntactic cues to anticipate
sentence referents to the visual context.