Does hitting the window break it?: Investigating effects of discourse-level and verb-level information in guiding object state representations

During language comprehension, comprehenders form mental representations of the described events. We investigate discourse-level and verb-level cues that guide this process. In particular, we investigate how comprehenders represent object states when events are described with manner verbs that do not entail change-of-state (e.g. hit, wash): a potential change-of-state of the object can be inferred but is not semantically required. We report two reaction-time-based experiments (Experiment 1: lexical decision, Experiment 2: self-paced reading) that investigated how rapidly comprehenders process linguistic material associated with potential change-of-state inferences, in contexts where the preceding discourse context and verb-level information are manipulated. In both experiments, we find an interaction between discourse-level information and verb-level information in guiding object state representations. We highlight the need to take into account discourse-level factors in theorising about the cognitive process of understanding the dynamics of event representation during language comprehension.