Abstract
We present a study on the role of visual representations in the access to conceptual structure of verbs during sentence processing. In our study, we used an eye-tracking paradigm in which subjects heard sentences while looking at pictures of objects displayed on a computer screen. We controlled the time course of saccade onsets to pictures of objects by holding and releasing the saccades at different points during and after the presentation of verbs and their complements. We contrasted two classes of linguistic constructions, a highly constraining causative construction in which there is a close conceptual relation between verb and direct object (e.g., The woman burned the candle), and a neutral one with a transitive perception verb (e.g., The woman admired the candle). As visual stimuli we used pictures of six types of objects, a target object (the referent of the noun grammatical object of the verb; e.g., candle), a semantic competitor (e.g., lamp), a phonological competitor (e.g., candy), an object with the same shape as the target, an object with the same color as the target, and a random object. We found significant differences between probe points and context types, with causative verbs engendering faster saccade onset times to their objects. This difference was more pronounced at the onset of the main verb. The magnitude of the saccade onset times for both sentence conditions, however, indicates that verb-conceptual effects occur after verb information is accessed. The results of these experiments are discussed in the context of modular and interactive cognitive architectures. We propose a model for the time-course of the interaction between linguistic and visual information in short-term memory.