Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper investigates the processing of linguistic elements whose interpretation depends on retrieving information that was available earlier in the situation. Using the visual-world paradigm, we examine the processing of the verb return, which requires that an object has previously moved. We manipulated whether the moved object (and the movement itself) was described using language, by its typical label or by its location, or whether it was seen moving without that movement being labeled. We also manipulated whether the instructions were positive (e.g., Return the X), therefore requiring the listener to perform an action, or negative (e.g., Don’t return the X), which required no action. Results reveal a sensitivity to how information was introduced. Most importantly, with positive instructions, the naming of the object did not have an effect, whereas with negative instructions, naming was important to interpretation. These results indicate that the way information is introduced affects the status of this information when it is retrieved; these findings also lead us to explicitly consider the hypotheses that link language processing and visual attention.