Developing a cross-methodlogical processing account of situated language comprehension

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Pia Knoeferle
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2006 to 2008
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 29734138

It has been shown that not only linguistic and world knowledge, but also scene information can influence incremental comprehension. Specifically, three experimental paradigms have contributedinsights into how comprehension and visual processes interact: eye tracking in scenes during spokencomprehension, the measuring of response latencies in sentence-picture verification tasks, and electrophysiological recordings in situated contexts. Psycholinguistic theories of sentence comprehension, however - while providing detailed accounts of the integration of linguistic knowledge- do not yet adequately address the interaction of comprehension with visual processes.Prior own work has sketched a preliminary account of the coordinated interplay between linguisticand visual processes based on findings from eye tracking in scenes during spoken comprehension.The proposed research will develop a more complete account of situated scene sentencecomprehension through the systematic exploitation of findings and measures provided by all three paradigms. In this way, evidence concerning visual attention, processing complexity, and underlying neural processes can be drawn upon simultaneously in refining our account. The diverse methods will further support extending the account across written and spoken language modalities, as well as for different visual contexts (simple vs. complex, static vs. dynamic).

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Hosts: Professorin Dr. Marta Kutas; Professor Dr. Michael K. Tanenhaus