Visually situated language comprehension in children and in adults

Abstract

Accounts of visually situated language processing accommodate an active role of the visual context and a tight temporal coordination between comprehension, visual attention, and visual context effects in young adults. By contrast, these psycholinguistic accounts have not yet modelled variation due to age groups (e.g., children), social (e.g., class), or cognitive factors (e.g., a comprehender’s working memory). Extending these accounts with a model of the comprehender could refine their predictions regarding variation due to factors such as comprehender age amongst others. With this goal in mind, the present chapter reviews results on realtime visual context effects and visually situated language comprehension in children and in healthy young adults. It also uses insights from the literature on language learning to argue that visual context should play an active role in child language comprehension and that children benefit from a similarly rapid interplay of visual attention and language comprehension as do young adults.