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<Paper uid="P96-1007">
  <Title>INVITED TALK Eye Movements and Spoken Language Comprehension</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="53" end_page="53" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have reviewed results establishing that, with well-defined tasks, eye-movements can be used to observe under natural conditions the rapid mental processes that underlie spoken language comprehension. We believe that this paradigm will prove valuable for addressing questions on a full spectrum of topics in spoken language comprehension, ranging from the uptake of acoustic information during word recognition to conversational interactions during cooperative problem solving.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Our results demonstrate that in natural contexts people interpret spoken language continuously, seeking to establish reference with respect to their behavioral goals during the earliest moments of linguistic processing. Thus our results provide strong support for models that support continuous interpretation. Our experiments also show that referentially relevant non-linguistic information immediately affects how the linguistic input is initially structured. Given these results, approaches to language comprehension that emphasize fully encapsulated processing modules are unlikely to prove fruitful. More promising are approaches in which grammatical constraints are integrated into processing systems that coordinate linguistic and non-linguistic information as the linguistic input is processed.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>