Action and actor gaze mismatch effects during spoken sentence processing

Eye tracking research on situated language comprehension has shown that participants rely more on a recent event than on a plausible future event during spoken sentence comprehension. When people saw a recent action event and then they listened to a German (NP1-Verb-Adv-NP2) past or futuric present tense sentence, they preferentially looked at the recent event target over another plausible target object (that might be involved in a future action) independent of tense. This preferential inspection persisted even when future events and futuric present sentences were much more frequent within the experiment, or when a gaze cue biased towards the future action target. The present experiments extend this line of research by introducing incongruence (in Experiment 1 a past tense verb mismatched the recently seen action and in Experiment 2 an actor gaze cue mismatched the past tense sentence condition). Can the verb-action and the gaze-sentence mismatches eliminate the recent-event inspection preference? Would participants recall information in post-experimental memory tests better for matches (the futuric present tense condition) than mismatches (the past tense condition)? Results revealed inspection of the recent event target as participants processed the verb-action mismatch (Exp 1) and actor gaze incongruence (Exp 2). However, the gaze (but not the verb-action) incongruence eliminated the overall recent event preference in the NP2 region. The memory tests also showed some evidence for a reversal of the recent-event preference.