Individual Differences in Keeping Track of Object-state Representations during Language Comprehension: Evidence from Eye Movements

There remains limited consensus about whether individual differences in working memory capacity, influences mental representation updating during language comprehension. We argue that this question was not sufficiently examined in previous psycholinguistic studies due to methodological limitations. In the current study, we examine whether individual differences in keeping track of mental representations of objects during real-time language comprehension could be predicted by digit span, reading span, nonverbal intelligence, executive function, and visual working memory capacity. Data were collected from 26 adults who completed a battery of cognitive tests and an eye-tracking experiment using the visual world paradigm. In the eye-tracking experiment, participants listened to sentences that either indicated a substantial or a minimal change of state on the target object while viewing a visual scene depicting the target object in two conflicting states – being intact and being changed, along with two unrelated distractors. As expected, participants’ visual attention was directed to the visual depiction of the target object that matched the implied end state in the language. Importantly, we demonstrate that individual differences in cognitive abilities influence whether participants shift their attention to the language-mediated object-state representations.