Representing object state change during sentence comprehension: Boundary conditions and language-specific constraints

Language comprehension entails forming contextually appropriate representations of describedentities and events. Previous work suggests that non-visual object properties like weight areautomatically integrated into event models during comprehension. Horchak and Garrido (2021)found that Portuguese speakers’ response times were faster when the state of a presented object(e.g., a smashed tomato) matched the event implied by the preceding sentence (e.g., You drop abowling ball on a tomato). In an exact pre-registered replication in English (Experiment 1), wefailed to replicate this sentence-picture match effect. To explore the reasons for this nonreplication, we designed three pre-registered extensions to examine the effects of another type ofstate change (slicing, Experiment 2), the role of implicit target object properties (squashability,Experiment 3), and the role of syntactic structure (sentence focus, Experiment 4). Contrary toprevious work, we observed a match effect on both accuracy and response times in Experiment4, but the effect on response times was only present when the target object was the focus (i.e.,subject) of the sentence. A follow-up survey comparing readers’ interpretation of the originalPortuguese stimuli and their English translations indicated that the syntactic structure ofPortuguese amplified the relative salience of the objects described in the state change event.Overall, these findings suggest that the representation of object state changes during languagecomprehension depends on the interaction of object properties and language-specific syntacticconstraints.