This study examined iconic gesture comprehension in autism, with the goal of assessing whether cross-modal processing difficulties impede speech-and-gesture integration. Participants were 19 adolescents with high functioning autism (HFA) and 20 typical controls matched on age, gender, verbal IQ, and socio-economic status (SES). Gesture…

Scalar inferences are commonly generated when a speaker uses a weaker expression rather than a stronger alternative, e.g., "John ate some of the apples" implies that he did not eat them all. This article describes a visual-world study investigating how and when perceivers compute these inferences. Participants followed spoken instructions…

We explored how speakers and listeners use hand gestures as a source of perceptual-motor information during naturalistic communication. After solving the Tower of Hanoi task either with real objects or on a computer, speakers explained the task to listeners. Speakers' hand gestures, but not their speech, reflected properties of the particular…

We present four experiments on the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases with and without possessors (e.g. "Andrew's picture of him/himself, the picture of him/himself"). The experiments (two off-line studies and two visual-world eye-tracking experiments) investigate how syntactic and semantic factors guide the…

Importance and predictability each have been argued to contribute to acoustic prominence. To investigate whether these factors are independent or two aspects of the same phenomenon, naive participants played a verbal variant of Tic Tac Toe. Both importance and predictability contributed independently to the acoustic prominence of a word, but in…

Two experiments used the head-mounted eye-tracking methodology to examine the time course of lexical activation in the face of a non-phonemic cue, talker variation. We found that lexical competition was attenuated by consistent talker differences between words that would otherwise be lexical competitors. In Experiment 1, some English cohort…

In many domains of cognitive processing there is strong support for bottom-up priority and delayed top-down (contextual) integration. We ask whether this applies to supra-lexical context that could potentially constrain lexical access. Previous findings of early context integration in word recognition have typically used constraints that can be…

Listeners are exquisitely sensitive to fine-grained acoustic detail within phonetic categories for sounds and words. Here we show that this sensitivity is optimal given the probabilistic nature of speech cues. We manipulated the probability distribution of one probabilistic cue, voice onset time (VOT), which differentiates word initial labial…

We used the contrastive expectation associated with scalar adjectives to examine whether listeners are sensitive to the distinction between common and privileged information during real-time reference resolution. Our results show that listeners used this distinction to narrow the set of potential referents to objects with contrasts in common…

Two experiments examined the role of common ground in the production and on-line interpretation of wh-questions such as "What's above the cow with shoes?" Experiment 1 examined unscripted conversation, and found that speakers consistently use wh-questions to inquire about information known only to the addressee. Addressees were sensitive to this…

Eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to manipulate one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Target words occurred in utterance-medial (e.g., "Put the cap next to the square") or utterance-final position (e.g., "Now click on the cap"). Displays consisted of the target picture (e.g., a cap), a…

Two visual-world experiments evaluated the time course and use of orthographic information in spoken-word recognition using printed words as referents. Participants saw 4 words on a computer screen and listened to spoken sentences instructing them to click on one of the words (e.g., "Click on the word bead"). The printed words appeared 200 ms…

Reports an error in "Context and spoken word recognition in a novel lexicon" by Kathleen Pirog Revill, Michael K. Tanenhaus and Richard N. Aslin ("Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," 2008[Sep], Vol 34[5], 1207-1223). Figure 9 was inadvertently duplicated as Figure 10. Figure 9 in the original article was correct.…

Three eye movement studies with novel lexicons investigated the role of semantic context in spoken word recognition, contrasting 3 models: restrictive access, access-selection, and continuous integration. Actions directed at novel shapes caused changes in motion (e.g., looming, spinning) or state (e.g., color, texture). Across the experiments,…

Eye-tracking and gating experiments examined reference comprehension with fluent (Click on the red. . .) and disfluent (Click on [pause] thee uh red . . .) instructions while listeners viewed displays with 2 familiar (e.g., ice cream cones) and 2 unfamiliar objects (e.g., squiggly shapes). Disfluent instructions made unfamiliar objects more…