Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We use visual world eye-tracking to test if a speaker’s eyegaze to a potential antecedent modulates the listener’sinterpretation of an ambiguous pronoun. Participants listenedto stories that included an ambiguous pronoun, such as “Thedolphin kisses the goldfish... He....” During the pre-pronominal context, an onscreen narrator gazed at one of thetwo characters. As expected, participants looked more at thesubject character overall. However, this was modulated by thenarrator’s eye gaze and the amount of time the participantspent looking at the gaze cue. For trials in which participantsattended to the narrator’s eye gaze for > 500ms, participantswere significantly more likely to interpret the pronoun asreferring to the object if the narrator had previously looked atthe object. Results suggest that eye gaze – a social cue – cantemper even strong linguistic/cognitive biases in pronounresolution, such as the subject/first-mention bias.