Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Using a novel adaptation of the visual world eye-trackingparadigm we investigated children’s and adults’ onlineprocessing of reference in a naturalistic language context.Participants listened to a 5-minute long storybook whilewearing eye-tracking glasses. The gaze data were analyzedrelative to the onset of referring expressions (i.e., full nounphrases (NPs) and pronouns) that were mentionedthroughout the story. We found that following the mentionof a referring expression there was an increase in theproportion of looks to the intended referent for both childrenand adults. However, this effect was only found early on inthe story. As the story progressed, the likelihood thatparticipants directed their eye gaze towards the intendedreferent decreased. We also found differences in the eye gazepatterns between NPs and pronouns, as well as betweenchildren and adults. Overall these findings demonstrate thatthe mapping between linguistic input and corresponding eyemovements is heavily influenced by discourse context.