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Work in psycholinguistics continues to demonstrate new ways in which perspective-taking guides language processing. E.g., recent work shows that, in sentences like “Sophie [told Amanda that]/[asked Amanda if] she likes learning new languages”, readers use perspective reasoning to judge the ambiguous pronoun as near-categorically referring to the subject antecedent in TELL (because Sophie possesses the relevant knowledge) and the object antecedent in ASK (Amanda’s knowledge). Although these patterns demonstrate a robust perspective effect, could they instead arise from shallow lexical cues provided by TELL/ASK? Experiment 1 rules out lexical-cue explanations by showing that preceding context sentences can compel readers to actually reverse the “default” antecedent judgements otherwise found for TELL/ASK sentences. Experiment 2 further explores the pragmatic basis of perspective-taking in stand-alone sentences by simply varying character properties, e.g., “Max asked his [son/tutor] Gerald if he understood the assignment correctly”, where Gerald’s role shifts who likely holds the relevant knowledge.

Psycholinguistic accounts of pronoun resolution have emphasized the influence of discourse-level and lexical cues (e.g., order-of-mention/coherence relations/implicit causality). Less work has considered situation-specific pragmatic reasoning effects, which we explore here using communicative perspective-taking. Expts1-2 used sentences like “Molly [asked Ana if]/[told Ana that] she remembers when lecture starts” to assess readers’ judgments for antecedents of ambiguous pronouns. We predicted that characters ASKING about the subordinate clause information should entail readers interpreting the pronoun as co-referring with the main-clause object, whereas TELLING should entail main-clause subject interpretations. This is because we do not tell people what they already know nor ask people something that we should know that they do not. The results corroborated our predictions: Participants picked the “perspectivally-congruent” antecedent 99.8% of the time, with no order-of-mention effect (which would predict stronger effects for TELL, where the antecedent is the first-mentioned character). Expts3-6 corroborated the results through self-paced reading and stops-making-sense tasks.

Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of "retrieval," whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither necessary nor sufficient for interpreting a pronoun, and even when an antecedent has been introduced in earlier discourse, there is little evidence for the retrieval of linguistic "form." The current study extends our understanding of pronoun interpretation by examining whether the "semantics" of antecedent expressions are retrieved from representations of past discourse. Participants were instructed to move displayed objects in a Visual World eye-tracking task. In some cases, the semantics of the antecedent were no longer viable after an instruction was completed (e.g., "Move the house on the left to area 12," where the result was that a different house is now the leftmost one). In this case, retrieving antecedent semantics at the point of hearing a subsequent pronoun ("Now, move it…") should entail a processing penalty. Instead, the results showed that antecedent semantics have no direct effect on interpretation, raising additional questions about the role that retrieval might play in pronoun interpretation.

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' incremental interpretation of size adjectives, focusing on whether contrastive inferences are modulated by speaker behavior. Children (N = 120, 59 females, mostly White, tested between July, 2018 and August, 2019) encountered either a conventional or unconventional speaker who labeled objects in a correspondingly typical or atypical way. Critical utterances contained size adjectives (e.g., "Look at the big duck"). With conventional speakers, gaze measures indicated that children rapidly used the adjective to differentiate members of a contrasting pair, indicating that even 4-year-olds derive contrastive inferences. With unconventional speakers, contrastive inferences were delayed in processing. The findings demonstrate that preschoolers adjust their use of pragmatic cues when presented with evidence disconfirming their default assumptions about a speaker.

In face-to-face interaction, speakers spontaneously produce manual gestures that can facilitate listeners' comprehension of spoken language. The present study explores the factors affecting the uptake and influence of gesture cues in situations where a speaker is referring to objects visible to the listener. In this context, the listener's attention must be distributed across various scene regions, potentially reducing the ability to draw on and apply gesture cues in real time. In two experiments, the instruction provided by a speaker (e.g., "pick up the candy") was accompanied by an iconic grasp gesture (produced alongside the verb) that reflected the size/shape of the intended target. Effects on listeners' comprehension were compared with a no-gesture condition. Experiment 1 (audiovisual gating task) showed that, under simplified processing circumstances, gesture cues allowed earlier identification of intended targets. Experiment 2 (eye tracking) explored whether this facilitation is found in real-time comprehension, and whether attention to gesture information is influenced by the acoustic environment (quiet vs. background noise). Measures of gaze position showed that although the speaker's gesturing hand was rarely fixated directly, gestures did facilitate comprehension, particularly when the target object was smaller relative to alternatives. The magnitude of the gesture effect was greater in quiet than in noise, suggesting that the latter did not provoke listeners to increase attention to gesture to compensate for the challenging auditory signal. Together, the findings clarify how situational factors influence listeners' attention to visual information during real-time comprehension.

Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults' comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to age-related decline (e.g., processing speed and memory) or their greater proclivity for linguistic redundancy, as suggested in language production studies. The present study explores the effects of linguistic redundancy on younger and older listeners' incremental referential processing, judgments of informativity, and downstream memory performance. In an eye tracking task, gaze was monitored as listeners followed instructions from a social robot referring to a unique object within a multi-object display. Critical trials were varied in terms of modifier type ("…closed/purple/[NONE] umbrella") and whether displays contained another object matching target properties (closed purple notebook), making modifiers less effective at narrowing attention. Relative to unmodified descriptions, redundant color modifiers facilitated comprehension, particularly when they narrowed attention to a single referent. Descriptions with redundant state modifiers always impaired real-time comprehension. In contrast, memory measures showed faster recognition of objects previously described with redundant state modifiers. Although color and state descriptions had different effects on referential processing and memory, informativity judgments showed participants perceived them as informationally redundant to the same extent relative to unmodified descriptions. Importantly, the patterns did not differ by listener age. Together, the results show that the effects of linguistic redundancy are stable across adulthood but vary as a function of modifier type, visual context, and the measured phenomenon.

Despite the rise in communicative technologies for healthy aging, little research has focused on how effectively older adults process language spoken by artificial agents. We explore whether a robot's redundant (but potentially helpful) descriptions facilitate real-time comprehension in younger and older listeners. Gaze was recorded as participants heard instructions like "Tap on the [purple/closed] umbrella" for a display containing eight unique objects. We manipulated the description (no-adjective, color-adjective, state-adjective) and the visual context, specifically whether there was another object bearing the property denoted by the adjective (purple/closed notebook). Relative to the no-adjective condition, redundant color adjectives speeded comprehension when they uniquely identified targets, whereas (less-salient) state adjectives always impeded comprehension. No age-related differences were observed. Paralleling human-human studies, language processing in human-robot communication is facilitated when salient information narrows visual search. Together, these findings help inform the future design of communicative technologies.

Social robotics has shown expansive growth in areas related to companionship/assistance for older adults. Critically, everyday interactions with artificial agents often involve spoken language in the context of a shared visual environment. Therefore, language interfaces for these applications must account for the distinctive nature of visually-situated communication revealed by psycholinguistic studies. In traditional frameworks, "rational" speakers were thought to avoid redundancy, yet human-human communication research shows that both younger and older speakers include redundant information (e.g., color adjectives) in descriptions to facilitate listeners' visual search. However, this "cooperative" use of redundant expressions hinges on beliefs about listeners' perception (e.g., "pop-out" nature of human color processing). We explored the incidence and nature of younger and older speakers' redundant descriptions for a robot partner in different visual environments. Whereas both age groups produced redundant descriptions, there were important age differences for when these descriptions occurred and for the properties encoded in them.

Pronouns (she, they) are semantically underspecified and depend on context for interpretation. One proposal is thatinterpretation occurs by reactivating a pronouns antecedent, consistent with memory reinstatement models. We evaluatethis account using a novel task where the semantics of the antecedent are no longer appropriate after an instruction iscompleted (e.g., Move the house on the left to area 3, where the result is that ANOTHER house is now the leftmost one).If antecedent semantics are activated when subsequently hearing a pronoun (”Now put it”), listeners should experienceconfusion regarding the intended referent. However, measures of (i) the object selected, (ii) mouse-click reaction times,and (iii) eye-movements all demonstrate the pronoun is effortlessly linked to the previously-mentioned object, regardlessof whether antecedent semantics are still relevant. This demonstrates that pronouns have indexical meaning, denoting afocused referent directly, and are not mediated by activating linguistic antecedents in discourse memory.

Most research suggests that older adults experience declines in cognitive abilities, but these outcomes are often drawn fromexperimental paradigms that do not employ naturalistic materials. The present study addresses this issue by examiningolder and younger adults’ ability to detect so-called native advertisements, which are designed to seamlessly blend intotheir medium. Participants viewed either real webpages (visual) or listened to abbreviated content from real radio/podcasts(auditory). Both age groups were less accurate and slower at detecting native compared to traditional advertisements. Fur-ther, older adults had greater difficulty detecting native advertisements on webpages, but no age-related differences wereobserved with auditory materials. The lack of differences in the auditory domain is intriguing, yet it is broadly consistentwith work suggesting spoken language abilities show little or moderate decline. Together, the results demonstrate hownaturalistic stimuli help reveal the extent to which specific domains are affected in cognitive aging.

Research on referential communication has explored talkers’ability to tailor descriptions for the current context. The presentstudy examines this issue alongside talker adaptations fordifferent addressees. Participants were asked to provide achild, adult, or computer with instructions to select and moveobjects on a display. Each target object was either unique oraccompanied by a same-category competitor. Targets in thelatter condition could be differentiated with either a modifieror subordinate term. In addition to examining speech onsetlatencies, we analyzed referential descriptions forinformational adequacy (just enough, underinformative,overinformative), noun type (basic-level or subordinate), andincidence/type of modifiers. The most noticeable effects wereobserved when addressing children, with participants usingmore basic terms and more modifiers (particularly color).These results reveal the spontaneous adaptation of referentialstrategies according to audience type, providing evidence formodels of language in which speakers actively consideraddressees' needs and cognitive abilities.

I met my cousin Ruthie Russell only once, at her funeral. She was my dad's second cousin, and she lived in a small town in Southern Indiana where my dad [...]

One core question in studies of language processing is the extent to which interlocutors engage in real-time communicative perspective-taking. Current evidence suggests that both children and young adult listeners are able to draw on common ground (shared knowledge) to guide referential interpretation. However, less is known about older listeners, who are often described as experiencing age-related cognitive declines that could affect their capacity to integrate perspective cues online. In the present study, we examined the extent to which younger and older listeners used common ground to guide the interpretation of temporarily ambiguous descriptions. Participants followed instructions from a Director to click on displayed objects. The target object (e.g., hat with blue feathers) was accompanied by a competitor (e.g., hat with pink feathers) or a control object (e.g., stapler). We manipulated whether the competitor/control was mutually visible (common ground) or not (privileged ground). The results revealed that, although listeners used perspective information to differentiate the target from the competitor in the common ground condition, this pattern was notably weaker in older adults. Whereas measures of executive function showed significant group differences in inhibitory control and working memory, no differences were found in theory of mind. Thus, age-related changes in communicative perspective-taking are not likely due to general declines in mentalizing ability. Furthermore, strict screening criteria for vision and hearing ability allowed us to rule out explanations involving age-related sensory decline. Together, the results advance our understanding of how younger and older adults integrate common ground during real-time referential processing.

In communicative situations, preschoolers use shared knowledge, or "common ground," to guide their interpretation of a speaker's referential intent. Using eye-tracking measures, this study investigated the time course of 4-year-olds' (n = 95) use of two different speakers' perspectives and assessed how individual differences in this ability related to individual differences in executive function and representational skills. Gaze measures indicated partner-specific common ground guided children's interpretation from the earliest moments of language processing. Nonegocentric online processing was positively correlated with performance on a Level 2 visual perspective-taking task. These results demonstrate that preschoolers readily use the perspectives of multiple partners to guide language comprehension and that more advanced representational skills are associated with the rapid integration of common ground information.

In the course of sentence processing, comprehenders mustidentify relationships between sentence elements in accor-dance with the sentence’s syntactic structure. However, low-level associative processes, which may yield interpretations in-compatible with global sentence context, have also been sug-gested to be at play in the early moments of processing. In twoexperiments, we examine the influence of low-level associa-tive cues alongside combinatorial information in sentences ofvarying complexity. Verb-driven predictions are used as meansto explore the use of these information sources in the earliestmoments of processing. In addition, we explore effects of lis-tener age on processing, given past claims that older adults’predictions are more shallow. However, results showed similarpatterns across age groups, although we did find clear ways inwhich associative cues overshadowed combinatorial computa-tions when these cues occurred very close to the verb.

Using real-time eye-movement measures, we asked how afantastical discourse context competes with stored representationsof semantic and world knowledge to influence children's andadults' moment-by-moment interpretation of a story. Seven-year-olds were less effective at bypassing stored semantic and worldknowledge during real-time interpretation than adults.Nevertheless, an effect of discourse context on comprehension wasstill apparent.

Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n = 97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time interpretation of ambiguous statements. However, these sensitivities were less apparent in overt responses, suggesting preschoolers' ability to integrate emotional perspective cues is at an emergent state. Perspective taking during online language processing was positively correlated with receptive vocabulary and an offline measure of emotional perspective taking, but not with cognitive perspective taking, conflict or delay inhibitory control, or working memory. Together, the results underscore how children's emerging communicative competence involves different kinds of perspective inferences with distinct cognitive underpinnings.

Two eyetracking experiments were conducted to investigate how the domain of interpretation for referential expressions is constructed and coordinated during utterance processing. Of particular interest was how the uniqueness requirement for a definite noun phrase (e.g. 'the book') could be satisfied given a particular array of candidate referents. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the conceptual relation expressed by a preposition immediately limits attention to compatible referents and in turn facilitates definite reference to these objects. Experiment 2 showed that domains are further constrained by the judgment of which referents are compatible with an intended action, and that uniqueness can be established by such factors even when several objects compatible with the noun phrase are present in the perceptual field. The results demonstrate that domains of interpretation for referential expressions are constructed and updated dynamically as an utterance unfolds in time, taking both linguistic and nonlinguistic factors into account.

Eye tracking was used to explore the role of grammatical aspect and world knowledge in establishing temporal relationships across sentences in discourse. Younger and older adult participants read short passages that included sentences such as "Mrs. Adams was knitting/knitted a new sweater"..."She wore her new garment...". Readers had greater difficulty processing the second event ("She wore...") if it followed the imperfective ("was knitting") rather than the perfective ("knitted") version of the earlier-mentioned event. This suggests that aspect information is encoded online and that the "in progress" interpretation of the imperfective impeded integration of the second event into the discourse model. However, world knowledge modulated the effect: When the first event was of short duration (e.g., writing a check), the influence of aspect was not evident in the early moments of processing. These effects were independent of age group, suggesting that the mechanisms involved in coordinating temporal information in discourse are stable across the adult lifespan. (Contains 3 tables, 1 figure, and 2 footnotes.)

We investigated how preschoolers use their understanding of the actions available to a speaker to resolve referential ambiguity. In this study, 58 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with arrays of eight objects in a toy house and were instructed to retrieve various objects from the display. The trials varied in terms of whether the speaker's hands were empty or full when she requested an object as well as whether the request was ambiguous (i.e., more than one potential referent) or unambiguous (i.e., only one potential referent). Results demonstrated that both 3- and 4-year-olds were sensitive to speaker action constraints and used this information to guide on-line processing (as indexed by eye gaze measures) and to make explicit referential decisions. (Contains 3 figures.)

Cantonese shape classifiers encode perceptual information that is characteristic of their associated nouns, although certain nouns are exceptional. For example, the classifier "tiu" occurs primarily with nouns for long-narrow-flexible objects (e.g., scarves, snakes, and ropes) and also occurs with the noun for a (short, rigid) key. In 3 experiments, we explored how the semantic information encoded in shape classifiers influences language comprehension. When judging the fit between classifiers and depicted objects in an explicit ranking task, Cantonese speakers evaluated classifier-noun pairings solely in terms of grammatical well-formedness and showed no separate sensitivity to the shape features of objects. In an eye-tracking task (Experiment 2), we also found little sensitivity to shape classifier semantics during real-time comprehension. However, in a subsequent experiment in which referent objects lacked the prototypical features for their accompanying classifiers (Experiment 3), an influence of shape semantics was found in participants' incidental fixations to nontarget objects. We conclude that shape classifiers influence referential interpretation primarily through their grammatical constraints, consistent with the agreementlike nature of classifiers in general. The role of shape classifiers' semantics on processing is apparent only in specific circumstances. (Contains 6 figures, 3 tables and 4 footnotes.)

Purpose: To use eye tracking to investigate age differences in real-time lexical processing in quiet and in noise in light of the fact that older adults find it more difficult than younger adults to understand conversations in noisy situations. Method: Twenty-four younger and 24 older adults followed spoken instructions referring to depicted objects, for example, "Look at the candle." Eye movements captured listeners' ability to differentiate the target noun ("candle") from a similar-sounding phonological competitor (e.g., "candy" or "sandal"). Manipulations included the presence/absence of noise, the type of phonological overlap in target-competitor pairs, and the number of syllables. Results: Having controlled for age-related differences in word recognition accuracy (by tailoring noise levels), similar online processing profiles were found for younger and older adults when targets were discriminated from competitors that shared onset sounds. Age-related differences were found when target words were differentiated from rhyming competitors and were more extensive in noise. Conclusions: Real-time spoken word recognition processes appear similar for younger and older adults in most conditions; however, age-related differences may be found in the discrimination of rhyming words (especially in noise), even when there are no age differences in word recognition accuracy. These results highlight the utility of eye movement methodologies for studying speech processing across the life span.

An eye tracking methodology was used to evaluate 3- and 4-year-old children's sensitivity to speaker affect when resolving referential ambiguity. Children were presented with pictures of three objects on a screen (including two referents of the same kind, e.g., an intact doll and a broken doll, and one distracter item), paired with a prerecorded referentially ambiguous instruction (e.g., "Look at the doll"). The intonation of the instruction varied in terms of the speaker's vocal affect: positive-sounding, negative-sounding, or neutral. Analyses of eye gaze patterns indicated that 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, were more likely to look to the referent whose state matched the speaker's vocal affect as the noun was heard (e.g., looked more often to the broken doll referent in the negative affect condition). These findings indicate that 4-year-olds can use speaker affect to help identify referential mappings during on-line comprehension. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)