Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated how constraints imposed by the concurrentvisual context modulate the effects of prior gender and actioncues as well as of stereotypical knowledge during situatedlanguage comprehension. Participants saw videos of female ormale hands performing an action and then inspected a displayshowing the faces of two potential agents (one male and onefemale face) as they listened to German OVS sentences aboutstereotypically female or male actions. Unlike previousexperiments (Rodriguez et al., 2015), the display concurrentwith the sentence also showed a picture of the object of thevideotaped action and a ‘competitor object’ (with oppositestereotypical valence) that had not appeared in the video butcould be mentioned in the sentence. We measured eyemovements to the faces of the agents during comprehension.The design manipulated the match between the videotapedaction and the action described by the sentence (action-verb(phrase) match) and the match between the stereotypicalvalence of the verbally described action and the gender of theagent of the previous video (conveyed only by the hands;stereotypicality match). We replicated the results obtained inRodríguez et al. (2015): an overall target agent preference (i.e.the agent whose gender matched that of the hands seen in theprevious video), reduced by action-verb mismatches. However,unlike in their study, mismatch effects emerged earlier. Inaddition, stereotypicality effects emerged in the verb region.The earlier mismatch effects and added stereotypicality effectssuggest that the visual availability of the objects, perhapsjointly with the verbal input, facilitated the activation ofrepresentations from the recent videos (speeding up mismatcheffects) and the consideration of alternative representations,favoring stereotypical expectations.