Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Eye tracking research on situated language comprehension hasshown that participants rely more on a recent event than on aplausible future event during spoken sentence comprehension.When people saw a recent action event and then they listenedto a German (NP1-Verb-Adv-NP2) past or futuric present tensesentence, they preferentially looked at the recent event targetover another plausible target object (that might be involvedin a future action) independent of tense. This preferential in-spection persisted even when future events and futuric presentsentences were much more frequent within the experiment,or when a gaze cue biased towards the future action target.The present experiments extend this line of research by intro-ducing incongruence (in Experiment 1 a past tense verb mis-matched the recently seen action and in Experiment 2 an actorgaze cue mismatched the past tense sentence condition). Canthe verb-action and the gaze-sentence mismatches eliminatethe recent-event inspection preference? Would participants re-call information in post-experimental memory tests better formatches (the futuric present tense condition) than mismatches(the past tense condition)? Results revealed inspection of therecent event target as participants processed the verb-actionmismatch (Exp 1) and actor gaze incongruence (Exp 2). How-ever, the gaze (but not the verb-action) incongruence elimi-nated the overall recent event preference in the NP2 region.The memory tests also showed some evidence for a reversal ofthe recent-event preference.