Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper considers prediction in language processing by ex-amining the role of the visual context, and specifically, the roleof speaker referent gaze on cognitive load. We inspect the an-ticipatory visual attention during sentence processing togetherwith the cognitive load induced at the points of the gaze cue,and the linguistic referent. Employing a novel measurementof cognitive load - the Index of Cognitive Activity (Marshall,2000) allowed us to simultaneously consider both anticipatoryeye-movements and cognitive load. Our results show that thegaze cue is being followed, and considered as a relevant pieceof information, which subsequently reduces the cognitive loadon the linguistic referent. In addition, we found that consider-ing the gaze cue is in itself not costly, unless it cues an objectmismatching with the previous linguistic context.