EXPERIMENT 2 [4] CW- inconsistent If cats were vegetarians they would be cheaper for owners to look after. Families could feed their cat a bowl of |fish and| it would gobble it down happily. [1] & [2] RW- consistent & RW- inconsistent Evolution dictates that cats are carnivores and cows are vegetarians. 36 experimental items, 36 native English speakers 2 (CW/ RW) x 2 (consistent/ inconsistent) design Early disruption in regressions out from critical word following RW violation RW congruent items were processed as anomalous in a CW context RW inconsistencies led to longer reading times, more fixations and more regressions around the critical region than CW inconsistencies EXPERIMENT 3 [1], [2], [3] & [4] Families would feed their cat a bowl of… Longer lasting effects of RW knowledge (first-pass RT, Total RT & No. fixations on critical word) EXPERIMENT 1 [1] RW- consistent If cats are hungry they usually pester their owners until they get fed. Families could feed their cat a bowl of |fish and| it would gobble it down happily. [2] RW- inconsistent If cats are hungry they usually pester their owners until they get fed. Families could feed their cat a bowl of |carrots and| it would gobble it down happily. [3] CW- consistent If cats were vegetarians they would be cheaper for owners to look after. Families could feed their cat a bowl of |carrots and| it would gobble it down happily. SRI Dual Purkinje Generation 5.5 eye-tracker (3-factor design) 24 experimental items displayed in a fixed random order alongside fillers 36 native English speakers RW violations were treated as acceptable in a pre-specified CW context Effect on early processing for RW violations regardless of prior context INTERFERENCE FROM REAL-WORLD KNOWLEDGE ON ANTICIPATORY EYE-MOVEMENTS IN A COUNTERFACTUAL-WORLD? EXPERIMENT 4 RW- inconsistent / consistent If cats are hungry they usually pester their owners until they get fed. Families could feed their cat a bowl of carrots/ fish and it would gobble it down happily CW- consistent/ inconsistent If cats were vegetarians they would be cheaper for owners to look after. Families could feed their cat a bowl of carrots/ fish and it would gobble it down happily. SMI Eyelink II head-mounted eye-tracker 24 experimental items in a fixed random order alongside filler items, within-subjects 2x2 design 28 native English speakers (16 female) Participants anticipated towards a contextually relevant referent from 200 msec prior to critical word onset (i.e. towards ‘fish’ following a RW context and ‘carrots’ following a CW context) Shortly after the onset of the target word, however, the relevant ‘appropriate’ referent was visually favoured No effects of gender Heather J Ferguson, Christoph Scheepers & Anthony J Sanford Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge University. Urrutia, M.A., & de Vega, M. (2005). Canceling updating in counterfactuals. Paper presented at Society for Text & Discourse 15th Annual Meeting, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Walsh, C.R., & Byrne, R.M.J. (2004). Counterfactual Thinking and the Temporal Order Effect. Memory and Cognition, 32, GLASGOW LANGUAGE PROCESSING CONCLUSIONS Reading analysis shows that RW violations can be ‘neutralised’ within an appropriate pre-specified CW context, and RW-congruent items can lead to the experience of an anomaly following an inconsistent CW context. –Importantly, there was also evidence for early processing difficulty with RW violations regardless of prior context, indicating that a proposition is rapidly evaluated against real-world knowledge, just prior to the accommodation of a proposition into a counterfactual world representation. Visual-world results provide the first evidence that real-world biases in the visual world paradigm can be ‘neutralised’ by a prior context, suggesting that when visual information is available to reinforce linguistic input, participants expect a context-relevant continuation. VISUAL WORLD PARADIGM Numerous experiments have used the visual world paradigm to demonstrate that discourse processing is driven by predictive relationships involving syntax, semantics and real-world expectations. However, it is not clear whether these fundamental processing strategies can be influenced by introducing a counterfactual context. The issue we examined, therefore, was whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse to over-ride RW knowledge to predict specific upcoming words as the current sentence unfolds. BACKGROUND The ability to update our current knowledge using contextual information is a vital process during every-day language comprehension. Counterfactual reasoning, an understanding of events that are counter to reality, is an essential ingredient of our everyday cognition. Previous investigations of counterfactuals have concentrated on reasoning and production (Fauconnier, 1994; Walsh & Byrne, 2004) and psycholinguistic research has been more limited (Urrutia & de Vega, 2005).