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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.

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.

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.

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.)

We investigated the influence of speaker certainty on 156 four-year-old children's sensitivity to generic and nongeneric statements. An inductive inference task was implemented, in which a speaker described a nonobvious property of a novel creature using either a generic or a nongeneric statement. The speaker appeared to be confident, neutral, or uncertain about the information being relayed. Preschoolers were subsequently asked if a second exemplar shared the same property as the first. Preschoolers consistently extended properties to additional exemplars only when properties were described in a generic form by a confident or neutral speaker. If a speaker appeared to be uncertain or if statements were made in a nongeneric form, properties were not consistently extended beyond the first exemplar. The findings demonstrate that children integrate the inductive cues provided by generic language with social cues when reasoning about abstract kinds. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.)

A spoken language eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate the effects of sentence context and proficiency on parallel language activation during spoken language comprehension. Nonnative speakers with varying proficiency levels viewed visual displays while listening to French sentences (e.g., "Marie va decrire la poule" [Marie will describe the "chicken"]). Displays depicted several objects including the final noun target (chicken) and an interlingual near-homophone (e.g., pool) whose name in English is phonologically similar to the French target ("poule"). Listeners' eye movements reflected temporary consideration of the interlingual competitor when hearing the target noun, demonstrating cross-language lexical competition. However, competitor fixations were dramatically reduced when prior sentence information was incompatible with the competitor (e.g., "Marie va nourrir"...[Marie will "feed"...]). In contrast, interlingual competition from English did not vary according to participants' rated proficiency in French, even though proficiency reliably predicted other aspects of processing behavior, suggesting higher proficiency in the active language does not provide a significant independent source of control over interlingual competition. The results provide new insights into the nature of parallel language activation in naturalistic sentential contexts. (Contains 2 tables, 6 figures and 2 footnotes.)

Two experiments investigated 4-year-olds' use of descriptive sentences to learn non-obvious properties of unfamiliar kinds. Novel creatures were described using generic or nongeneric sentences (e.g., "These are pagons. Pagons/These pagons are friendly"). Children's willingness to extend the described property to a new category member was then measured. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that children reliably extended the property to new instances after hearing generic but not nongeneric sentences. Further, the influence of generic language was much greater than effects related to the amount of tangible evidence provided (the number of creatures bearing the critical property). Experiment 2 revealed that children continued to extend properties mentioned in generic descriptions even when incompatible evidence was presented (e.g., an example of an unfriendly "pagon"). The findings underscore preschoolers' keen understanding of the semantics of generic sentences and suggest that inferences based on generics are more robust than those based on observationally grounded evidence. (Contains 3 figures and 1 table.)

Recent studies have shown that listeners use verbs and other predicate terms to anticipate reference to semantic entities during real-time language comprehension. This process involves evaluating the denoted action against relevant properties of potential referents. The current study explored whether action-relevant properties are readily available to comprehension systems as a result of the embodied nature of linguistic and conceptual representations. In three experiments, eye movements were monitored as listeners followed instructions to move depicted objects on a computer screen. Critical instructions contained the verb "return" (e.g., "Now return the block to area 3"), which presupposes the previous displacement of its complement object--a property that is not reflected in perceptible or stable characteristics of objects. Experiment 1 demonstrated that predictions for previously displaced objects are generated upon hearing "return," ruling out the possibility that anticipatory effects draw directly on static affordances in perceptual symbols. Experiment 2 used a referential communication task to evaluate how communicative relevance constrains the use of perceptually derived information. Results showed that listeners anticipate previously displaced objects as candidates upon hearing "return" only when their displacement was known to the speaker. Experiment 3 showed that the outcome of the original act of displacement further modulates referential predictions. The results show that the use of perceptually grounded information in language interpretation is subject to communicative constraints, even when language denotes physical actions performed on concrete objects. (Contains 7 figures and 1 table.)

In 2 experiments, eye movements were monitored as participants followed instructions containing temporary syntactic ambiguities (e.g., "Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour"). The authors varied the affordances of task-relevant objects with respect to the action required by the instruction (e.g., whether 1 or both eggs in the visual workspace were in liquid form, allowing them to be poured). The number of candidate objects that could afford the action was found to determine whether listeners initially misinterpreted the ambiguous phrase ("in the bowl") as specifying a location. The findings indicate that syntactic decisions are guided by the listener's situation-specific evaluation of how to achieve the behavioral goal of an utterance.