During comprehension, listeners can draw upon different sources of non-linguistic information for reference resolution and structural disambiguation. While non-linguistic information plays an active role in extant accounts of sentence processing, social-context effects (e.g., of situation-formality on register processing) have received little attention. This eye-tracking pilot study (n=9, 34 critical items) examines whether (i) formality conveyed by a linguistic context can rapidly affect the visual interrogation of objects and associated comprehension processes; (ii) congruence of verb-argument meaning rapidly affects comprehension; and (iii) congruence in context formality and register interacts with semantic verb-argument congruence (testing to what extent we can assume a single conceptual store and closely-linked mental representation that encompasses register information).

Hypotheses: If participants are sensitive to formality-register and verb-argument congruence we expect this to manifest in eye gaze (more looks to formality-register and verb-argument matching than mismatching objects in a Visual-World paradigm, closely time-locked to an object argument conveying semantic information about register and permitting the computation of verb-argument congruence). The inclusion of these two factors permits us to assess not only questions (i) and (ii) but also (iii), via the presence or absence of a factorial interaction.

Results: Lmer results (n=9) show a main effect of verb-argument congruence but no main effect of formality-register congruence at the region between the verb onset and object -argument offset, indicating that verb-argument relations are computed and used rapidly in on-line language comprehension. Our analysis also revealed an interaction of formality-register and verb-argument congruence. These findings suggest that situation-formality might modulate the processing of verb-argument congruence, indicating that standard language processing mechanisms are in close interaction with register representations. The main experiment is underway (n=32).