Incremental Syntactic Disambiguation Using Depicted Events: Plausibility, Co-Presence and Dynamic Presentation

Prior research in the visual world paradigm has shown that copresent depicted events rapidly influence on-line structural disambiguation. The generality of this finding, however, is uncertain, since these studies relied on the visual co-presence of the depicted events, and on highly non-stereotypical stimuli which may have increased the salience of visual information. We conducted three visual world experiments to address these concerns. The first experiment used more plausible stimuli than prior studies. The second experiment investigated the disambiguation effect for prior events using the “blank screen” paradigm. In the third experiment, actions were animated and completed before the utterance started. While a disambiguation effect was found in all three experiments, the first and second showed an additional speed-up compared to previous studies while the third suggests competition with visual factors.