Discourse-mediation of the mapping between language and the visualworld: Eye movements and mental representation

摘要

Two experiments explored the mapping between language and mental representations ofvisual scenes. In both experiments, participants viewed, for example, a scene depicting awoman, a wine glass and bottle on the floor, an empty table, and various other objects.In Experiment 1, participants concurrently heard either 'The woman will put the glass onthe table' or 'The woman is too lazy to put the glass on the table'. Subsequently, with the sceneunchanged, participants heard that the woman 'will pick up the bottle, and pour the winecarefully into the glass.' Experiment 2 was identical except that the scene was removedbefore the onset of the spoken language. In both cases, eye movements after 'pour' (antic-ipating the glass) and at 'glass' reflected the language-determined position of the glass, aseither on the floor, or moved onto the table, even though the concurrent (Experiment 1) orprior (Experiment 2) scene showed the glass in its unmoved position on the floor. Lan-guage-mediated eye movements thus reflect the real-time mapping of language ontodynamically updateable event-based representations of concurrently or previously seenobjects (and their locations).