understanding. Representative research Integration of Visual and Linguistic Information in Spoken Language Comprehension In this study Tanenhaus looked at visual context and its effects on language comprehension. Tanenhaus wanted to investigate whether comprehension of language is informationally encapsulated or modular, as thought by many theorists and researchers including Jerry Fodor. Tanenhaus used eye-tracking software and hardware to record the movement of the subjects' eyes as they listened to phrases and manipulated objects in a scene. For critical stimuli, Tanenhaus used phrases that contained syntactic ambiguities, such as "Put the apple on the towel in the box," where the prepositional phrase "on the towel" is initially ambiguous between being a modifier (indicating which apple) or a goal (indicating where to put the apple). "Put the apple that's on the towel in the box" served as the control condition because "that's" signals that "on the towel" is unambiguously a modifier. Similar syntactic ambiguities had been used to provide evidence for modularity within syntactic processing. Tanenhaus speculated that a visual context could be just enough to influence the resolution of these ambiguities. When the subject is presented with the first scene, in Figure A, they become confused. We see this by the many eye movements of the subjects who are not quite sure which items to manipulate. In the second scene the subject clearly understands the sentence more easily. In this scene the pencil is replaced by another apple on a napkin. This disambiguates the phrase because the subject understands that on the towel is modifying the apple, and is not referring to a destination. The results strongly support the hypothesis that language comprehension, specifically at the syntactic level, is informed by visual information. This is a clearly non-modular result. These results also seem to support Just and Carpenter's “Strong Eye Mind Hypothesis” that rapid mental processes which make up the comprehension of spoken language can be observed by eye movements. Actions and Affordances in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution Using a similar task to the previous study, Tanenhaus took this next method one step farther by not only monitoring eye movements, but also looking at properties of the candidates within the scenes. Subjects heard a sentence like “Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour,” “Pour the egg that’s in the bowl over the flour” was used as a control. The first scene, in Figure B, was called a "compatible competitor" because both