Circumscribing referential domains during real-time language comprehension

A head-mounted eye-tracking methodology was used to investigate how linguistic and nonlinguistic information sources are combined to constrain referential interpretation, In two experiments, participants responded to instructions to manipulate physical objects in a visual workspace. Instructions on critical trials contained definite noun phrases preceded by spatial prepositions (e.g., Put the cube inside the can). Experiment 1 established that the lexical-semantic constraints of the preposition inside immediately limited attention to objects compatible with those constraints (i.e., containers), suggesting that the referential context is dynamically restructured as sentence comprehension proceeds. Experiment 2 evaluated the additional influence of nonlinguistic constraints by varying the number of container objects that were large enough to hold the object being moved. The results indicated that attention was initially restricted to only those containers large enough to accommodate the object. This outcome suggests that referential candidates are continuously evaluated in terms of their relevance for the action denoted by the unfolding utterance. Overall, the findings are consistent with an expectation-driven interpretive system that rapidly integrates linguistic information with situation-specific constraints and knowledge of possible actions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Sciene (USA).