Eye Movements and Spoken Language Comprehension

We present an overview of recent work in which eye movements are monitored as people follow spoken instructions to move objects or pictures in a visual workspace. Subjects naturally make saccadic eye-movements to objects that are closely time-locked to relevant information in the instruction. Thus the eye-movements provide a window into the rapid mental processes that underlie spoken language comprehension. We review studies of reference resolution, word recognition, and pragmatic effects on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Our studies show that people seek to establish reference with respect to their behavioral goals during the earliest moments of linguistic processing. Moreover, referentially relevant non-linguistic information immediately affects how the linguistic input is initially structured.