Towards a situated view of language
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Michael J. Spivey
Abstract
By examining a brief history of psycholinguistics and its various approaches to research on sentence processing, we point to a general convergence toward evidence that multiple different linguistic constraints interact in real-time to allow for successful comprehension of a sentence. While some traditions emphasized the unique importance syntactic structure and others emphasized semantic content, a consensus appears to be forming that sentence processing may be best characterized as involving fluid interaction among a wide variety of information formats, including acoustic-phonetic processing, lexical statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and even visual environments, action affordances, and social contexts. Rather than searching for the “cognitive architecture” of the language system in the form of a box-an-arrow diagram that displays which processing module becomes operative before which other processing modules, this extensive array of findings suggests that the field of sentence processing may find clearer success by treating the process as a dynamical system composed of interactive processes, rather than domain-specific processors.
Abstract
By examining a brief history of psycholinguistics and its various approaches to research on sentence processing, we point to a general convergence toward evidence that multiple different linguistic constraints interact in real-time to allow for successful comprehension of a sentence. While some traditions emphasized the unique importance syntactic structure and others emphasized semantic content, a consensus appears to be forming that sentence processing may be best characterized as involving fluid interaction among a wide variety of information formats, including acoustic-phonetic processing, lexical statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and even visual environments, action affordances, and social contexts. Rather than searching for the “cognitive architecture” of the language system in the form of a box-an-arrow diagram that displays which processing module becomes operative before which other processing modules, this extensive array of findings suggests that the field of sentence processing may find clearer success by treating the process as a dynamical system composed of interactive processes, rather than domain-specific processors.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface vii
- Towards a situated view of language 1
- Perception of the visual environment 31
- Attention and eye movement metrics in visual world eye tracking 67
- The role of syntax in sentence and referential processing 83
- Reaching sentence and reference meaning 127
- Discourse level processing 151
- Figurative language processing 185
- The role of affordances in visually situated language comprehension 205
- Characterising visual context effects 227
- Visual world studies of conversational perspective taking 261
- Visual environment and interlocutors in situated dialogue 291
- Coordinating action and language 323
- Index 357
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface vii
- Towards a situated view of language 1
- Perception of the visual environment 31
- Attention and eye movement metrics in visual world eye tracking 67
- The role of syntax in sentence and referential processing 83
- Reaching sentence and reference meaning 127
- Discourse level processing 151
- Figurative language processing 185
- The role of affordances in visually situated language comprehension 205
- Characterising visual context effects 227
- Visual world studies of conversational perspective taking 261
- Visual environment and interlocutors in situated dialogue 291
- Coordinating action and language 323
- Index 357
