Table1.DOCX

Recent findings have shown that information about changes in an object's environmental location in the context of discourse is stored in working memory during sentence comprehension. However, in these studies, changes in the object's location were always consistent with world knowledge (e.g., in “The writer picked up the pen from the floor and moved it to the desk,” the floor and the desk are both common locations for a pen). How do people accomplish comprehension when the object-location information in working memory is inconsistent with world knowledge (e.g., a pen being moved from the floor to the bathtub)? In two visual world experiments, with a “look-and-listen” task, we used eye-tracking data to investigate comprehension of sentences that described location changes under different conditions of appropriateness (i.e., the object and its location were typically vs. unusually coexistent, based on world knowledge) and antecedent context (i.e., contextual information that did vs. did not temporarily normalize unusual coexistence between object and location). Results showed that listeners' retrieval of the critical location was affected by both world knowledge and working memory, and the effect of world knowledge was reduced when the antecedent context normalized unusual coexistence of object and location. More importantly, activation of world knowledge and working memory seemed to change during the comprehension process. These results are important because they demonstrate that interference between world knowledge and information in working memory, appears to be activated dynamically during sentence comprehension.

近期研究表明，在句子理解过程中，话语语境中关于物体环境位置变化的信息会被存储于工作记忆（working memory）中。然而，此类研究中物体位置的变化始终与世界知识（world knowledge）相符——例如在句子"作家从地板拾起钢笔并将其放到书桌上"中，地板与书桌均为钢笔常见的放置位置。但当工作记忆中的物体位置信息与世界知识相悖时（例如将钢笔从地板移至浴缸），人们是如何完成句子理解的？本研究通过两项采用"观看-聆听"（look-and-listen）任务的视觉世界实验（visual world experiment），利用眼动追踪（eye-tracking）数据，探究了在不同适配性条件（即基于世界知识，物体与其位置通常共存vs.异常共存）与先行语境条件（即语境信息是否会暂时性地使物体与位置的异常共存合理化）下，描述位置变化的句子的理解过程。实验结果显示，听者对关键位置的提取同时受到世界知识与工作记忆的影响；且当先行语境使物体与位置的异常共存合理化时，世界知识的影响效应会被削弱。更为关键的是，在理解过程中，世界知识与工作记忆的激活状态似乎会发生动态变化。本研究结果具有重要意义，因为其证实了：在句子理解过程中，世界知识与工作记忆中的信息之间的干扰似乎会被动态激活。