Recent years have seen growing interest in the interface between visual perception, language, and action (e.g.,

that visual perception can influence and be influenced by concurrent linguistic input has prompted the emergence of a new paradigm for studying spoken-language compre-hension. In the visual-world paradigm, pioneered by Cooper (1974) and further developed by Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, and Sedivy (1995), language pro-cessing is studied by examining participants ’ eye gaze to objects in a display as a spoken utterance, referring to one or more objects, is heard (see also Altmann & Kamide, 1999). For example, the instruction “pick up the candle ” may be heard concurrently with the presentation of a display containing a candle, candy, pear, and bottle. The probability of fixating each object over time, as lin-guistic information unfolds, is taken to reflect the listen-er’s developing interpretation of the linguistic input. This assumption relies on people directing their attention— and most often their gaze—to what is being referred to in the utterance, when that referent is visually available. Saccadic eye movements are fast and ballistic; thus, they provide a real-time measure of linguistic processing. Moreover, time course can be assessed without inter-rupting the speech stream, and the listener’s interpreta-tion can be inferred without requiring a metalinguistic decision. Thus, the visual-world paradigm has strengths that complement more traditional methods used to study speech perception. The relationship between eye movements and spoken-language processing has perhaps been demonstrated most convincingly in studies of lexical processing where fix-ations reflect the dynamics of lexical activation (e.g., Al