The influence of state change on object representations in language comprehension
- PDF / 395,144 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 31 Downloads / 155 Views
The influence of state change on object representations in language comprehension Xin Kang 1,2
&
Anita Eerland 3 & Gitte H. Joergensen 4,5 & Rolf A. Zwaan 6 & Gerry T. M. Altmann 4,5
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Abstract To understand language people form mental representations of described situations. Linguistic cues are known to influence these representations. In the present study, participants were asked to verify whether the object presented in a picture was mentioned in the preceding words. Crucially, the picture either showed an intact original state or a modified state of an object. Our results showed that the end state of the target object influenced verification responses. When no linguistic context was provided, participants responded faster to the original state of the object compared to the changed state (Experiment 1). However, when linguistic context was provided, participants responded faster to the modified state when it matched, rather than mismatched, the expected outcome of the described event (Experiment 2 and Experiment 3). Interestingly, as for the original state, the match/mismatch effects were only revealed after reading the past tense (Experiment 2) sentences but not the future-tense sentences (Experiment 3). Our findings highlight the need to take account of the dynamics of event representation in language comprehension that captures the interplay between general semantic knowledge about objects and the episodic knowledge introduced by the sentential context. Keywords Object state . Mental representation . Language comprehension . Tense . Picture verification
Introduction One of the dominant features of human language communication is to intentionally talk about absent entities in the past and future that are not immediately spatially or temporally near the speaker and the listener (Cuccio & Carapezza,
* Xin Kang [email protected] Anita Eerland [email protected] 1
Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
2
Brain and Mind Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
3
Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
4
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, United States
5
Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, United States
6
Department of Psychology, Education, and Child Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
2015; Morford & Goldin-Meadow, 1997). This ability to use displaced reference may be unique to humans (Hockett, 1960; Liszkowski et al., 2009) and is linked to the socialcognitive skills of humans and grammatical system of languages (Bergen & Chang, 2005). For example, auxiliary verbs such as Bwill^ and Bwere^ in English are used to indicate whether an event occurred before or after the moment of speaking or events under discussion. Altmann and Kamide (2007) revealed that visual attention can be directed differently to the visual
Data Loading...
