ABSTRACT
This chapter describes much of what is currently known about how young children go about interpreting the sentences that they hear against their surrounding real-world environments. As we will describe further, we have the advantage of being able, by recording children’s eye movements, to measure their moment-to-moment visual attention to objects in the world while they hear spoken sentences unfolding over time. This eye-gaze-duringlistening paradigm was originally developed by Tanenhaus and colleagues to study adults’ sentence comprehension abilities (e.g., Tanenhaus, SpiveyKnowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995; Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Carlson, 1999; cf. Cooper, 1974). As discussed extensively in this volume, the basic idea behind this paradigm is that by measuring how visual-attentional states line up in time with the successive arrival of words and phrases, researchers can gain insight into the real-time processes by which listeners organize sentences structurally and semantically and how they map these representations onto the events and objects that they denote (Tanenhaus & Spivey-Knowlton, 1996). To accept this link between data and interpretation, one need only believe that, to a useful approximation, the mind is going where the eye is going.1
