We present an overview of recent work in which eye movements are monitored as people follow spoken instructions to move objects or pictures in a visual workspace. Subjects naturally make saccadic eye-movements to objects that are closely time-locked to relevant information in the instruction. Thus the eye-movements provide a window into the rapid mental processes that underlie spoken language comprehension. We review studies of reference resolution, word recognition, and pragmatic effects on syntactic ambiguity resolution. .
