The activation of object-state representations during online language comprehension.

Understanding the time-course of event knowledge activation is crucial for theories of language comprehension. We report two experiments using the 'visual world paradigm' (VWP) that investigated the dynamic mapping between object-state representations and real-time language processing. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences that described events resulting in either a substantial change of state (e.g. The chef will chop the onion) or a minimal change of state (e.g. The chef will weigh the onion). Concurrently, they viewed pictures depicting two versions of the target object (e.g., an onion) corresponding to the intact and changed states, and two unrelated distractors. A second sentence referred to the object with either a backward or a forward shift in event time (e.g. But first/And then, he will smell the onion). In Experiment 2, Degree of Change was manipulated by using different nouns in the first sentence (e.g. The girl will stomp on thepenny/egg). The second sentence was similar to the ones used in Experiment 1 (e.g., But first/And then, she will look atthe penny/egg). The results from both experiments showed that participants looked more at the 'appropriate' state of the object that matched the language context, but the shift of visual attention emerged only when the object name was heard. Our findings suggest that situationally appropriate object representations do trigger eye movements to the corresponding states of the target object, but inappropriate representations are not necessarily eliminated from consideration until the language forces it.
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