Multiple cue integration in language acquisition the differential contribution of phonological and distributional cues

AMLaP-2003 AMLaP-2003 9th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing August 25–27, 2003 Glasgow, Scotland Sponsored by the British Academy 9th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Organising Committee: Simon Garrod Linda Moxey August 25–27, 2003 Tony Sanford Glasgow, Scotland Sara Sereno Patrick Sturt Programme Committee: Organising Committee: Simon Garrod Linda Moxey Tony Sanford Sara Sereno Patrick Sturt Gerry Altmann Kathryn Bock Marc Brysbaert Manuel Carreiras Chuck Clifton Martin Corley Matt Crocker Eugene Dawydiak Janet Fodor Fernanda Ferreira Angela Friederici Simon Garrod Ted Gibson Barbara Hemforth Yuki Kamide Frank Keller Gerard Kempen Lars Konieczny Vincenzo Lombardo Maryellen McDonald Brian McElree Don Mitchell Linda Moxey Wayne Murray Neal Pearlmutter Martin Pickering Joel Pynte Keith Rayner Tony Sanford Christoph Scheepers Sara Sereno Suzanne Stevenson Patrick Sturt Mike Tanenhaus Matt Traxler John Trueswell Jos Van Berkum Conference Helpers: Mois´es Betancort Jason Bohan Eugene Dawydiak Tracy MacLeod Jo Molle Lorna Morrow Heather Ferguson Scott Graham Barbara Howarth i Peter Ward Monday August 25th Tuesday August 26th 9.00-10.45: Registration Chair : Chuck Clifton (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) 10.45-11.00: Opening Remarks Chair : Patrick Sturt (University of Glasgow) 11.00-11.30: Brian McElree, Martin Pickering, Matthew Traxler, Steven Frisson: Enriched compositional processing 11.30-12.00: Manabu Arai, Roger van Gompel, Jamie Pearson, Vera Schumacher: The representation of transitivity information 12.00-12.30: Laurie Stowe, Monika Zempleni, John Hoeks: Processing Idioms in the Left and Right Hemispheres 9.00-9.30: Pia Knăoferle, Matthew Crocker, Christoph Scheepers, Martin Pickering: The interaction of mental representations from linguistic and visual input: A processing account of role-assignment in visual worlds 9.30-10.00: Fernanda Ferreira, Janet Fodor, Ellen Lau: Structure-Building and Lexical Access During Garden-Path Recovery 10.00-10.30: Markus Bader, Josef Bayer: Diagnosis and Garden-Path Recovery-Case and Agreement Symptoms Revisited 10 12 13 10.30-11.00: Coffee Break Chair : Tony Sanford (University of Glasgow) 12.30-14.30: Lunch and Poster Session Chair : John Henderson (Michigan State University) 14.30-15.00: Irina Sekerina: Grammatical gender and mapping of referential expressions in Russian 15.00-15.30: Gerry Altmann, Silvia Gennari, Louise Shackleton: Situating language in the visual world: Mapping the semantics of language onto the semantics of visual scenes 15.30-16.00: Elsi Kaiser, John Trueswell: Dividing up referential labor: Finnish pronouns and demonstratives in on-line processing 11.00-11.30: Wind Cowles, Maria Polinsky, Marta Kutas, Robert Kluender: Brain responses to differences in the processing of informational and contrastive focus 11.30-12.00: Marieke van Herten, Herman Kolk, Dorothee Chwilla: How semantic analysis can overrule syntactic analysis: an ERP study 12.00-12.30: Albert Kim, Janice Chen, Caitlin Rippey, Lee Osterhout: Combinatory semantic processing can occur independently of syntactic support 15 17 18 12.30-14.30: Lunch and Poster Session Chair : Christoph Scheepers (University of Dundee) 16.00-16.30: Coffee Break Chair : Martin Pickering (University of Edinburgh) 16.30-17.00: Jennifer Arnold, Zenzi Griffin: The role of competition in the production of referring expressions 17.00-18.00 (Invited): Michael Tanenhaus: Referential Domains in Language Processing 14.30-15.00: Zenzi Griffin: Precision Timing in Speaking 15.00-15.30: Robert Hartsuiker, Martin Pickering, Nivja de Jong: Semantic facilitation and phonological interference in self-correction: evidence from picture naming 15.30-16.00: Victor Ferreira, Robert Slevc, Erin Rogers: How speakers avoid linguistic ambiguity? 19 20 21 16.00-16.30: Coffee Break 19.00: Civic Reception at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art Chair : Simon Garrod (University of Glasgow) 16.30-17.00: Sarah Brown-Schmidt, Michael Tanenhaus: Real-time circumscription of referential domains in non-scripted task-based dialog 17.00-18.00 (Invited): Jonathan Ginzburg: What clarification requests tell us about dialogue information states 19.00: Conference Dinner and Ceilidh at College Club ii iii 22 23 Wednesday August 27th Poster Session 1, Monday August 25th Chair : Matt Crocker (Universităat des Saarlandes) 9.00-9.30: Luca Onnis, Padraic Monaghan, Nick Chater, Korin Richmond: Phonology impacts segmentation and generalisation in speech processing 9.30-10.00: Morten Christiansen, Florencia Reali, Padraic Monaghan, Nick Chater: Multiple-Cue Integration in Language Acquisition: The Differential Contribution of Phonological and Distributional Cues 10.00-10.30: Frank Keller: A Psychophysical Law for Linguistic Judgments 24 25 26 10.30-11.00: Coffee Break Chair : Linda Moxey (University of Glasgow) 11.00-11.30: Julia Simner, Martin Pickering: Anticipating Cause and Consequence during Text Comprehension 27 11.30-12.00: Martin Corley, Lucy MacGregor, Bryony Tilley: Task demands and the allocation of attention in reading: some early investigations 28 12.00-13.00 (Invited): Peter Hagoort: How the brain solves the binding problem for language 29 13.00-14.30: Lunch and Poster Session Chair : Julia Simner (University of Edinburgh) 14.30-15.00: Roger van Gompel, Asifa Majid: Accessing antecedents: Pronouns with infrequent antecedents are easier to process than pronouns with frequent antecedents 15.00-15.30: Raymond Bertram, Jukka Hyoă năa, Alexander Pollatsek: Compound processing in Finnish: a survey 15.30-16.00: Jeremy Pacht, Walter Schroyens, G´ery d’Ydewalle: Lexical competition in visual word recognition: Evidence from foveal and parafoveal form-priming paradigms 30 31 32 16.00-16.30: Coffee Break Chair : Don Mitchell (University of Exeter) 16.30-17.00: Eva Fern´andez, Dianne Bradley, Jos´e Manuel Igoa, Celia Teira: Prosodic phrasing in the RC-attachment ambiguity: Effects of language, RC- length, and position 17.00-17.30: Despina Papadopoulou, Theodore Marinis, Leah Roberts: Lexical effects in sentence processing: evidence from modifier attachment in Greek and English 17.30-18.00: Shravan Vasishth: Processing noncanonical constructions in free word order languages iv 33 35 36 Keller: Evaluating Probabilistic Models of Human Parsing Hemforth, Konieczny, Pynte: Event-types in pronoun resolution Konieczny, Schimke, Hemforth: The dynamics of plural-markings in agreement errors in production Pynte, Portes, Holcomb, Di Cristo: Relative Clause Attachment in French: an ERP study Scheepers, Klee: Pre-verb thematic role assignment and -revision in German verb-final constructions: Counter-evidence from eye-movements in reading O’Bryan, Folli, Harley, Bever: Event structure effects on garden pathing Harrison, Branigan, Hartsuiker, Pickering: Three way attraction effects in Slovenian McCauley, Shillcock: Does the Asymmetric Neighbourhood Effect interact with handedness in English Readers? Sanford, Bohan, Sanford, Molle: Detecting text changes as a function of load and extent of change: what’s the mechanism? 10 Weber, Grice, Crocker: Effects of prosody on the resolution of word-order ambiguities 11 Bard, Anderson, Flecha-Garcia, Kenicer, Mullin, Micholson, Smallwood, Chen: Controlling attention and structure in dialogue: the interlocutor v the clock 12 Carlson, Kennedy, Dickey: Accents, structure, and the interpretation of gapping sentences 13 Catchpole, Hartsuiker, Pickering: Self-corrections in speech: Evidence against Levelt’s Main Interruption Rule 14 Eiter, Radach, Inhoff: The Nature of the Phonological Code Accessed Early in Visual Word Recognition during Sentence Reading 15 Longtin, Hall´e, Segui: Word processing, morphological surface structure and the lexicon 16 Tsai, Chen, Chen: Implicit Priming with Direct Word Naming in Single Word Production 17 Yang, Gordon: The Computational Cost of Syntactic and Semantic Integration for Processing Sentences with Relative Clauses — A Case Study of Chinese 18 Hsu, Bruening: Investigating Gap-Filler Dependencies in Chinese: Is There an ‘Active Gap’? 19 Cacciari, Padovani, Verzellesi, Carreiras: Contextual effects on the time course of linguistic and conceptual gender information in understanding double-gender words 20 Bradley, Fern´andez, Lovric: Overt prosody in the RC-attachment construction: Elicitation protocols 21 de Goede, Wester, Bastiaanse, Swinney, Shapiro: Verb activation patterns in Dutch matrix clauses during on-line spoken sentence processing 22 Janssen, Muckel, Schiesser: Frequency can account for word order effects in German: A matter of the appropriate corpus query 23 Hai: Computer Simulation of a Serial Parsing Model 24 Roland, Elman, Ferreira: Why ‘that’? 25 Kruijff, Vasishth: Quantifying word order freedom in natural language: Implications for sentence comprehension 26 Mariol, Schelstraete: Implicit learning and lexical spelling: Rules abstraction and/or frequency based processes? 27 Fossard, Garnham, Cowles: Referential Accessibility and Anaphoric Resolution: the Case of the Demonstrative Noun-Phrase That N 28 Corley: Filled pauses can um help the listener 29 East: Simulating spell-out-of-trace with an SRN v 39 41 42 43 44 45 46 48 50 51 52 53 54 55 57 58 59 61 62 63 65 66 67 69 70 71 72 73 74 30 Michael, Gordon: Differential processing of sentential information: Effects on Recovery from the Garden Path 31 Roberts, Chater: Spreading activation as a mechanism for lexical smoothing 32 Santesteban, Costa: Can highly-proficient early bilinguals acquire two independent syntactic systems?Influence of L1 Head-Parameter on DP production in L2 33 Poesio: Combining salience and lexical filtering for bridging references resolution 34 Tanaka: Dual-mechanism model in derivational morphology - evidence from Japanese Causative formation vi Poster Session 2, Tuesday August 26th 75 76 77 78 79 East: The parser: a word-level thief? 82 Hemforth, Schimke: Length and position in French 83 Hemforth, Konieczny, Bueche: Who was in France? The accessability of referents in RCattachment 84 Konieczny, Dăoring: Anticipation of clause final heads Evidence from eye-tracking and SRN simulations 85 Pynte, Colonna, Gola: Can an “unnatural” prosody help parsing? 86 Branigan, Cleland, McLean: Modality effects on sentence production: syntactic activation in speech, writing and typing 87 Nicholson, Bard: The Intentionality of Disfluency : Findings from Feedback and Timing 88 Carlson, Dickey, Frazier, Clifton: Sluicing is affected by focus, but how? 89 Christianson: When Reanalysis Becomes Too Costly: Heuristic-based Parsing in a Free Word-Order Language 90 10 Agnihotri, Mahajan, Vasishth, Fanselow, Schlesewsky: More isn’t always better: A surprising constraint on retrieval cues in human sentence parsing 91 11 Gaskell, Cox, Foley, Grieve, O’Brien: To “thee” or not to “thee”? Constraints on allomorph pronunciation 93 12 Cardillo: Semantic Priming by a Sentence Context in Bilinguals: Reduced Context Sensitivity and Inhibition 94 13 Torgersen: Temporal and semantic factors in perception of the voicing contrast in L2: Effects of L2 proficiency on processing strategies 95 14 Andonova, Janyan: Searching for Gender Congruency in Bulgarian 96 15 Kaiser, Trueswell: Beyond the basic pronoun: A look at the referential properties of Dutch anaphoric paradigms 97 16 Heuttig, Altmann: Language-mediated eye movements and the differential effects of the processing of perceptual and conceptual colour information 99 17 van Gompel, Pearson: Competition during lexical ambiguity resolution 100 18 Kreiner, Koriat: From Structure to Meaning: The Contribution of Prosodic representation 101 19 Grodner, Sedivy: The Effect of Speaker-Specific Information in On-Line Pragmatic Inferencing 102 20 Yamashita, Chang, Hirose: Language-dependent Aspects of Structural Priming 103 21 Hăartl: No repetition priming with conceptually plausible objects: Object categorization in sentential contexts 105 22 Cowles, Garnham: Antecedent Focus and Conceptual Distance in NP Anaphor Resolution106 23 Steiner: Recycling Structure: A New Dimension in the Processing of Coordination 107 24 Thomson, Shillcock, McDonald: The Role of the Magnocellular Pathway in Visual Word Recognition 109 25 Hăaussler, Bader, Bayer: Number attraction in sentence comprehension 110 26 Ashby, Martin, Morris: Syllable effects in English word recognition: An ERP investigation112 27 Mirkovic, Seidenberg, Joanisse: Leaving the past tense behind: computational studies of a morphologically-complex language 113 28 Boland, Hartsuiker, Pickering, Postma: The implementation of repairs in speech production: evidence from the time-course of different repairs 114 29 Seegmiller, Townsend, Ingraffea: The Role of Event Structure in Comprehending Garden Path Sentences 115 vii 30 Betancort, Gillon Dowens, Carreiras: Subject and Object relative clauses: Whats going on in Spanish? 31 Leicht: Why some people not experience the garden path effect? The case of Hebrew 32 Monaghan, Chater, Christiansen: Phonological typicality and lexical processing 33 Buttery, Villavicencio: Language Acquisition and the Universal Grammar 34 Ward, Sturt, Sanford, Dawydiak: The effects of linguistic focus and semantic distance on eye movements in a text-change detection task viii Poster Session 3, Wednesday August 27th 116 117 118 119 120 Hemforth, Konieczny, Schimke: Modifier attraction and object attraction 122 Pynte, Gola: Adjunct predicates, discourse context, and the primary/non-primary distinction124 Christianson: Interpreting ‘pro’ in Isolated Sentences 125 Pickering, Branigan, McLean: Dialogue structure and the activation of syntactic information126 Vasishth: The role of decay and activation in human sentence processing 127 Shillcock, Monaghan: Visual word recognition and the anatomy of the visual system: the processing style of the corpus callosum 129 Pitel, Sansonnet: Toward a Uniform Architecture for Processing Application-Oriented Dialogue 130 Featherston: The relationship between judgement data and frequency data in syntactic well-formedness: The Decathlon Model 132 Muckel, Schliesser, Pechmann: Prosodic cues to argument structure in German 133 10 McDonald, Thomson: Using eyetracking to contrast lexical-level and conceptual-level connections in the bilingual lexicon 134 11 Vainio, Hyăonăa, Anneli Pajunen: Relative co-occurrence frequency affects the processing of verb arguments in Finnish: An eye-tracking study 135 12 Gennari, MacDonald: Linking production and comprehension in processing relative clauses 136 13 Repp, Sommer: Verb coding in complex sentences: Evidence from eye-movements in the production of coordination with and without ellipsis 137 14 Warren, Gibson, Jameson, Hirsch: Effects of NP type on reading English clefts 138 15 Desmet, Ferreira: Implicit Causality as an Inherent Feature of Verbs and Verb Classes 139 16 MacLeod, Garrod: Where is the Twist in the Tongue Twister? Dysfluencies following Spoken and Heard Twister Strings 140 17 Chen, Chen: Morphological Processing in the Production of Chinese Compound Words 142 18 Sakas, Fodor: Slightly ambiguous triggers for syntactic parameter setting 143 19 Shen, Mitchell: A Poster of Relative Clause Attachment Processing in Chinese 144 20 Trueswell, Kaiser: Information Source and Temporal Precedence in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Verb-Final Constructions in Dutch 145 21 Igoa, Teira: The contribution of prosody to relative clause attachment in spoken sentences in Spanish 147 22 Kiakogiorgi: Evaluating the morphological competence of school - age children in a highly inflected language: a crosslinguistic perspective 148 23 Wardlow, Ferreira: Finding Common Ground: How Do Speakers Block Privileged Information? 150 24 Irmen: How grammatical and stereotypical gender influence the representation of person information? 151 25 Kăuhnast, Saddy, Stojanova: Processing Negation and Aspect in Bulgarian Evidence from Normal and Agrammatic Sentence Comprehension 152 26 Kempen, Harbusch: A corpus study into word order variation in German subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of grammatical function assignment 153 ix Enriched compositional processing McElree1 , Pickering2 , Traxler3 , The representation of transitivity information Frisson4 Manabu Arai1 Roger P.G van Gompel1 Jamie Pearson2 Vera Schumacher3 m.arai@dundee.ac.uk, r.p.g.vangompel@dundee.ac.uk, jamie.pearson@ed.ac.uk University of Dundee University of Edinburgh University of Zăurich Brian Martin J Matthew J Steven brian.mcelree@nyu.edu, Martin.Pickering@ed.ac.uk, mjtraxler@ucdavis.edu New York University University of Edinburgh University of California at Davis University of Massachussetts at Amherst Although traditional views of composition hold that semantic properties retrieved from the lexicon are simply combined in a manner informed by syntactic structure, recent formal analyses and online studies of common expressions suggest that a more complex mechanism is needed to compute contextually appropriate interpretations Compositional processes can modify default interpretations of expressions and introduce semantic content not explicitly represented in the sentence or discourse One class of expressions requiring an enriched form of composition is VPs involving verbs that select for event complements (“begin”, “enjoy”, etc.) followed by NP complements that denote entities (“the book”, “a beer”, etc.) Self-paced and eye-tracking measures have demonstrated that these expressions are more difficult to process than control expressions, which can be interpreted with simple compositional operations that combine lexically stored senses (McElree et al., 2001; Traxler et al, 2002) We report three new eye-tracking studies that examined how contextual information affected enriched composition in order to identify what specific operations distinguish enriched from simple composition An expression like “the student began the book”, which readers report interpreting as “the student began reading the book”, may be difficult to process because it requires complex operations to construct a specific event sense for the complement, it is ambiguous and engenders competition between alternative interpretations (e.g., reading versus writing the book), or it requires a costly retrieval operation to recover a plausible activity for the event interpretation Introducing the activity with a context like “The student was reading in the library” did not attenuate the processing cost: With this context or with a neutral context (“The student was resting in the library”), a target sentence like “After a while, he started a book ” was more difficult to process (e.g., longer total times on the verb and complement NP) than a control sentence like “After a while, he read a book ” However, introducing the entire event sense with a context like “The student started a book in his dorm room” or “The student read a book in his dorm room” completely eliminated the difficulty, whether the target sentence repeated the NP, “ he started a book ” (Experiment 2) or whether it replaced the NP with a pronoun, “ he started it ” (Experiment 3) These findings are incompatible with ambiguity- or retrieval-based accounts and suggest that interpretation is costly when composition requires construction of a sense not lexically stored or available in the immediate discourse References McElree, B., Traxler, M J., Pickering, M J., Seely, R E., & Jackendoff, R (2001) Reading time evidence for enriched semantic composition Cognition, 78, B15–B25 Traxler, M., McElree, B., & Pickering, M (2002 ) Coercion in sentence processing: Evidence from eyemovements and self-paced reading Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 530–547 We employed the syntactic priming paradigm (Bock, 1986; 1989) to investigate how people represent verb transitivity information In Experiment 1, we investigated whether transitivity information is represented separately for individual verbs (lexical specific hypothesis) or for the class of verbs as a whole (category-general hypothesis) Participants read prime sentences such as (1), and subsequently provided a spoken completion to (2) a b c d The youngster and the schoolgirl were bullying (intransitive, verb repeated) The youngster and the schoolgirl were jeering (intransitive, verb not repeated) The youngster was bullying the schoolgirl (transitive, verb repeated) The youngster was jeering the schoolgirl (transitive, verb not repeated) While the prisoner was bullying According to the lexically specific hypothesis, priming should be larger when the verbs in the prime and target are the same than when they are different, because transitivity information is represented separately for different verbs The category-general hypothesis predicts that priming should be unaffected by verb repetition, because transitivity information is only associated with the class of verbs as a whole We observed an interaction between transitivity of the prime and verb repetition After intransitive primes, participants produced more intransitives when the target verb was repeated than when it was not repeated This indicates that information about intransitives is represented at the lexically specific level In contrast, no verb repetition effect occurred after transitive primes, indicating that information about transitives is represented at a category-general level In Experiment 2, we investigated how people represent transitivity information in passive sentences If transitivity information is represented separately for passives and actives, transitive priming from passives (3a) should be smaller than from transitive actives (3b) In contrast, if transitivity information for passives and actives is represented together, transitive priming from passives should be the same as from actives a It is unimaginable to the youngster that the schoolgirl was bullied (passive) b It is unimaginable that the youngster has bullied the schoolgirl (active) Participants produced fewer transitive sentences after (3a) than after (3b), indicating that transitivity information for actives and passives is represented separately Furthermore, in line with Experiment 1, we observed no effect of verb repetition We modify Pickering and Branigan’s (1998) syntactic representation model to explain the results from both experiments Most importantly, we claim that information about transitives is represented differently from information about intransitives We argue that the reason for this difference is that the transitive subcategorisation frame represents the default case, because almost all verbs can be used transitively (even so-called intransitive verbs like sneeze: Peter sneezed blood) As a result, there is no need to represent information about transitives for individual verbs In contrast, not all verbs can be used intransitively, and therefore information about intransitives is represented for individual verbs Processing Idioms in the Left and Right Hemispheres Laurie A Stowe, Monika, Z Zempleni and John Hoeks l.a.stowe@let.rug.nl, m.z.zempleni@let.rug.nl, j.c.j.hoeks@let.rug.nl Rijksuniversiteit Groenigen Idioms are fixed phrases which appear to be stored in the mental lexical with their meaning, which is usually not compositionally derived from the individual words Right hemisphere brain damage frequently affects idiom comprehension Tompkins, Boada and McGarry ((1992) demonstrated that RH patients showed speeded word monitoring within idioms as opposed to non-idioms even if they were unable to paraphrase idioms, suggesting that idioms can be accessed as sequences by these patients but that the meaning cannot be used normally The exact contribution of the right hemisphere in dealing with the meaning of these sentences remains unclear In the current study, we investigated the role of the two hemispheres by presenting 54 Dutch sentences which were disambiguated by preceding context to the idiomatic or the non-idiomatic meaning (e.g The minister stood on her toes, meaning annoyed her, vs The ballerina stood on her toes, which has the compositional interpretation) These sentences were presented one word at a time in the center of a computer screen, in order to be available to both hemispheres At the end of each sentence, subjects were presented with an unrelated word, a word which was related to the sentence’s idiomatic meaning (e.g annoy) or a word which was related to the literal meaning (e.g dance) in either the left or right visual field, where it could initially only be processed by the the contralateral hemisphere (divided visual field technique) Subjects made a lexical decision to the target words After idiomatic sentences, there was a significant interaction between relatedness and visual field; for words presented to the left hemisphere there was priming of the idiom related word relative to both unrelated words and literal related words; the latter did not differ Words related to either meaning showed facilitation in the right hemisphere This evidence suggests that the left hemisphere tends to choose the idiomatic meaning, while the right hemisphere keeps both options open, as it does for other types of ambiguity (Faust and Gernsbacher, 1993) After literal context sentences, on the other hand, both idiom and literal related words were slowed relative to the unrelated word in the right hemifield (left hemisphere), suggesting that needing to inhibit the idiomatic meaning caused considerable processing difficulties On the other hand, the right hemisphere showed faster decision times for literal related words than for unrelated words These results clearly confirm that the two hemispheres respond to the disambiguation of these sentences in a qualitatively different way References Faust ME, Gernsbacher MA Cerebral mechanisms for suppression of inappropriate information during sentence comprehension Brain Lang 1996; 53: 234-259 Tompkins,C.A, Boada, R., and McGarry, K 1992 The access and processing of familiar idioms by braindamaged and normally aging adults Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 35(3): 626-637 Grammatical gender and mapping of referential expressions in Russian Irina Sekerina sekerina@postbox.csi.cuny.edu CUNY College of Staten Island For many languages, it has been shown that in production, gender-matching prenominal adjectives can facilitate noun identification (Bates et al., 1996) In comprehension, the research on the role of gender has produced mixed results (JPR, 1999) In an eye-tracking experiment with gender manipulation in French, Dahan et al (2000) did not find gender priming (le zebre vs le balai/la chaussette) although the cohort effect was eliminated by the gender-marked article (le bouton vs la bouteille) Dahan and colleagues proposed two competing explanations for the role of gender: grammar-based (grammatical gender carried by the article) vs form-based (article co-occurrence with the noun) Based on their results with the article-noun and adjective-noun pairs in French, they argued for the form-based effects of gender in spoken-word recognition We present the results from a head-mounted eye-tracking experiment in Russian (N=16) that clearly supports the immediate influence of grammatical gender encoded on the color adjective in constraining the referential set of nouns In Russian, a noun’s gender (MASC, FEM, or NEUT) morphologically marked by the noun ending is also encoded in modifying adjectives - “krasn-aja / yj / oe” (’red+FEM /MASC /NEUT’) Three types of visual displays were manipulated: Control (the red car+FEM), with Gender-mismatching distractor (the red car+FEM and the red flower+MASC), and with Gender-matching competitor (the red car+FEM and the red squirrel+FEM.) The second factor manipulated the adjacency of the adjective and the noun: canonical ADJ NOUN VERB vs discontinuous ADJ VERB NOUN (’The red put car in Position 6’), common in Colloquial Russian In contrast to the Dahan et al.’s results, we found that in the canonical ADJ+NOUN word order, there were significantly more looks to the gender-matching competitor (the red squirrel) than to gendermismatching distractor (the red flower), 35% vs 5% These looks occurred in the noun region, 300-700 ms after the onset of the noun but before its offset Moreover, the effect of gender was significant even in the discontinuous ADJ NOUN order, when only the gender-matching competitor was rapidly checked and discarded resulting in target fixation well before the noun was encountered, during the verb region Looks at Competitor Gender-mismatching Gender-matching region (N or V) 600-1100ms 5% 35% region (N or V) 1100-1600ms 1% 14% Looks at Target region (N or V) 600-1100ms 63% 39% region (N or V) 1100-1600ms 90% 75% Thus, in agreement with the grammar-based account, listeners were able to rapidly use the grammatical gender on the adjective to restrict the referential set to those nouns that are consistent with this grammatical gender References Bates, E., Devescovi, A., Hernandez, A., & Pizzamiglio, L (1996) “Gender priming in Italian.” Perception and Psychophysics, 58(7), 992-1004 Dahan, D., Swingley, D., Tanenhaus, M., & Magnuson, J (2000) “Linguistic gender and spoken-word recognition in French.” Journal of memory and Language, 42, 465-480 Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 1999 Vol 28(5-6) Special Issue: Processing Grammatical Gender Situating language in the visual world: Mapping the semantics of language onto the semantics of visual scenes Gerry T.M Altmann1 , Silvia P Gennari2 and Louise A Shackleton3 g.altmann@psych.york.ac.uk, sgen@lcnl.wisc.edu, las111@york.ac.uk University of York University of Wisconsin-Maddison Static scenes can be interpreted and encoded in respect of how the portrayed state may change (cf Freyd, 1987) In principle, a visual scene portraying a man, a young girl, a motorbike, a carousel, some beer and some sweets, may engender representations that encode the possibility that riding (of the motorbike or carousel) may take place Subsequently, if participants hear the man/girl will ride/taste (cf Kamide et al., 2003), aspects of the semantic event structures that would result from interpreting this sentence may already have been constructed during the interpretation of the scene We report here two studies which assessed whether visual scenes can prime visual (Expt 1) or spoken (Expt 2) words, and specifically, verbs In Experiment 1, 50 participants were shown 32 scenes showing, for example, a girl dancing (the related condition), or sitting on the floor (the unrelated condition) The scene stayed onscreen for 3000 ms and was followed by a fixation prompt and then a visual word (e.g DANCE) in response to which participants had to make a lexical decision Mean decision latencies were 571 ms and 547 ms in the unrelated and related conditions respectively (p