Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous work suggests that non-visual object properties like weight are automatically integrated into event models during language comprehension. Horchak and Garrido (2021) found that Portuguese speakers' response times were faster when the state of a presented object (e.g., a smashed tomato) matched the event implied by the preceding sentence (e.g., You drop a bowling ball on a tomato). In an exact replication in English (Experiment 1), we failed to replicate this weight-state match effect. In Experiment 2, we examined the potential role of sentence focus, manipulating whether the target item served as the subject or direct object in the sentence. Response times revealed a weight-state match effect, but only when the target object was the focus (i.e., subject) of the sentence. Overall, these findings suggest that the representation of object state changes during language comprehension may depend on the interaction of object properties and language-specific syntactic constraints.