There is now a well-established literature showing that people anticipate upcoming concepts and words during language processing. Commonsense knowledge about typical event sequences and verbal selectional preferences can contribute to anticipating what will be mentioned next. We here investigate how temporal discourse connectives…

During face-to-face communication, people use visual cues about what their partners are attending to as they process language. An eyetracking experiment explored how addressees use speakers' eye gaze and head orientation while interpreting references to objects in a spatial task. Thirty-six naive director/matcher pairs seated face-to-face were…

It has been argued that people construct situation models during text reception and that these are analogous, multimodal representations of text grounded in perception and action. On the one hand, abundant evidence has been generated that recipients perceptually simulate features of the situation described in the text. On the other hand, findings…

The public debate on the use of the German nonbinary gender asterisk ("Lehrer*in" 'teacher') is emotionally charged. While it has been adopted by political and educational institutions, opponents argue that it is inappropriate for making persons identifying themselves beyond the male-female-dichotomy more visible. We investigated this…

It is well established in studies of two-party conversation that conversational partners jointly establish brief labels for repeatedly mentioned entities. When speaking to a new partner who is unfamiliar with the labels, speakers use longer expressions to facilitate understanding. How this process of audience design scales up to multiparty…

In two experiments this study tested the "Graded Salience Hypothesis" and the "Defaultness Hypothesis." It weighs the effects of linguistic versus pictorial contexts in terms of activation (or suppression) of default, salient meanings when context invites nondefault, less-salient alternatives. Using a naming task, Experiments 1…

We often use pronouns like it or they without explicitly mentioned antecedents. We asked whether the human processing system that resolves such indirect pronouns uses the immediate visual-sensory context in multimodal discourse. Our results showed that people had no difficulty understanding conceptually central referents, whether explicitly…

Despite the longstanding belief in an inner voice, there is surprisingly little known about the perceptual features of that voice during text processing. This article asked whether readers infer nonlinguistic phonological features, such as speech rate, associated with a character's speech. Previous evidence for this type of auditory imagery has…

This study investigated the effect of visual signals on perceptual span in text search and the kinds of signal information that facilitate the search. Participants were asked to find answers to specific questions in chapter-length texts in either a normal or a window condition, where the text disappeared beyond a vertical 3 degrees gaze-contingent…

The Landscape Model of text comprehension was extended to the comprehension of audiovisual discourse from text and video TV news stories. Concepts from the story were coded for activation after each sequence, creating a matrix of activations that was reduced to a vector of the degree of total activation for each concept. In Study 1, the degree…