부산대학교 도서관

Eye-tracking research has revealed that people rely more ona recently enacted action-event than consider a plausible futureaction-event when hearing a sentence referring to a visualscene. When participants encountered a recently enactedaction-event, and then listened to a (NP1-Verb-Adv-NP2) pastor futuric present tense sentence in German, they inspected thetarget of the recently seen event more often than that of theequally plausible future target shown, irrespective of sentencetense. These preferential looks towards the recent target persistedeven when future events and futuric present sentenceswere presented with greater frequency within the experiment.The current experiments assessed whether the preferentiallooks toward recent targets occur in similarly structured Englishsentences containing earlier, more localized tense markers(auxiliary verbs: will/has), and in Georgian sentences containingan even earlier case marking at the first noun phrase(nominative and ergative case). Can the early morphosyntacticcues eliminate the preferential inspection of the recent target?Results revealed that when participants processed the tensemarker in Experiment 1 (English) and 2 (Georgian), the biastowards looking at the recent target was reduced. However, inGeorgian, the morphological marker on its own was not able toeliminate the strength of the recent event. In both experiments,participants rapidly started to decrease their looks towards therecent target when exposed to the clear future tense cues at theverbs and this gaze pattern continued into the later word regions.This shows that participants were able to use the tensecues but only partly use the morphosyntactic cues to anticipatesentence referents to the visual context.