From visual perception to comprehension: Variations in construal and gaze behavior

Abstract

The study explores the construal shifts from VISUAL PERCEPTION to COMPREHENSION image schemas (Grady, 2005) which the readers may face when they deal with the contexts employing the verb of visual perception видеть (see) in the Russian language. The aim of the study is to find out how different image schema types affect the readers’ gaze behavior and default interpretation. It develops a two-stage procedure which involves the corpus-based semantic analysis followed by the oculographic experiment and participants’ reports. The corpus-based search and semantic annotation help define a range of linguistic attractors (Gibbs, 2006) contingent on the image schema types of visual perception and comprehension with the latter exhibiting a more abstract character (Grady, 2005). To proceed, we appeal to the morphological, lexical, and syntactic attractors of the verbs of perception and abstract semantics outlined in (Kustova, 2004; Baicchi & Digonne, 2018; Béligon et al., 2019) and apply them for further samples annotation and contingency analysis. The typical attractors for VISUAL PERCEPTION image schema involve the verb in the perfective, visual semantics in pre-position, direct object in post-position, negation marker, animated direct object in post-position; whereas the COMPREHENSION image schema attractors are scarce and are restricted to attributes of evaluation in pre-position and several adverb types. The oculographic experiment tests the effects of perceptual construal priming and the construal entrenchment on gaze behavior and default interpretation. The experiment did not reveal significant schema type contingency on interpretation, however in terms of gaze behavior COMPREHENSION image schema was more demanding.