Intersentential coreference expectations reflect mental models of events

Date

2018

Contributor

Advisor

Department

Instructor

Depositor

Speaker

Researcher

Consultant

Interviewer

Narrator

Transcriber

Annotator

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Elsevier

Volume

Number/Issue

Starting Page

Ending Page

Alternative Title

Abstract

Comprehenders’ perception of the world is mediated by the mental models they construct. During discourse processing, incoming information allows comprehenders to update their model of the events being described. At the same time, comprehenders use these models to generate expectations about who or what will be mentioned next. The temporal dynamics of this interdependence between language processing and mental event representation has been difficult to disentangle. The present visual world eye-tracking experiment measures listeners’ coreference expectations during an intersentential pause between a sentence about a transfer-of-possession event and a continuation mentioning either its Source or Goal. We found a temporally dispersed but sustained preference for fixating the Goal that was significantly greater when the event was described as completed rather than incomplete (passed versus was passing). This aligns with reported offline sensitivity to event structure, as conveyed via verb aspect, and provides new evidence that our mental model of an event leads to early and, crucially, proactive expectations about subsequent mention in the upcoming discourse.

Description

Keywords

Citation

Grüter, T., Takeda, A., Rohde, H., & Schafer, A. J. (2018). Intersentential coreference expectations reflect mental models of events. Cognition, 177, 172-176.

Extent

Format

Geographic Location

Time Period

Related To

Table of Contents

Rights

This mansucript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Rights Holder

Local Contexts

Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.