Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Behavioral studies demonstrate the influence of speakergaze in visually-situated spoken language comprehension.We present an ERP experiment examining the influence ofspeaker’s gaze congruency on listeners’ comprehension of ref-erential expressions related to a shared visual scene. Wedemonstrate that listeners exploit speakers’ gaze toward ob-jects in order to form sentence continuation expectations:Compared to a congruent gaze condition, we observe an in-creased N400 when (a) the lack of gaze (neutral) does not al-low for upcoming noun prediction, and (b) when the noun vi-olates gaze-driven expectations (incongruent). The later alsoresults in a late (sustained) positivity, reflecting the need to up-date the assumed situation model. We take the combinationof the N400 and late positivity as evidence that speaker gazeinfluences both lexical retrieval and integration processes, re-spectively (Brouwer et al., in press). Moreover, speaker gazeis interpreted as reflecting referential intentions (Staudte &Crocker, 2011).