ABSTRACT

There is now a well-established literature showing that people anticipate upcoming concepts and words during language processing. Commonsense knowledge about typical event sequences and verbal selectional preferences can contribute to anticipating what will be mentioned next. We here investigate how temporal discourse connectives (before, after), which signal event ordering along a temporal dimension, modulate predictions for upcoming discourse referents. Our study analyses anticipatory gaze in the visual world and supports the idea that script knowledge, temporal connectives (before eating → menu, appetizer), and the verb’s selectional preferences (order → appetizer) jointly contribute to shaping rapid prediction of event participants.

摘要

现在有一份完善的文献表明，人们在语言处理过程中会预测即将出现的概念和单词。关于典型事件序列和口头选择偏好的常识性知识有助于预测接下来将提到的内容。我们在这里研究了时间话语连接词（之前，之后），它表示沿时间维度的事件排序，如何调节对即将到来的话语所指的预测。我们的研究分析了视觉世界中的预期凝视，并支持脚本知识、时间连接词（吃之前→菜单、开胃菜）和动词的选择偏好（顺序→开胃菜）共同有助于塑造事件参与者的快速预测的观点。