Assessing the influence of speech-contingent eye movements to spoken word referents and competitors on word comprehension.
Speaker:Juliane Steinberg
Institution: Saarland University
Abstract:
In my thesis I am trying to find out more about the role and mechanisms of speech-contingent eye movements. Within a few hundred milliseconds of the production or comprehension of a spoken word people quite consistently shift their gaze towards objects that either directly depict that word's referent or are in some way related to that word's referent. These eye movements are a behavior that has been observed and exploited in lots of studies on language processing, in the so-called visual world paradigm. Still there remain many open questions about them, one of which is whether looks to words' (near-) referents have an effect on the comprehension of those words.
Several studies were conducted that combined the visual world and primed lexical decision paradigms to be able to assess the deployment of visual attention and the ease of comprehension at the same time. While looking at an array of depicted objects participants were asked to decide whether a simultaneously presented spoken utterance was a word or not. Experimental trials all had real words as auditory stimuli and varied in that one of the displayed objects (the 'target') either exactly depicted the spoken word, had a name that started the same way as the spoken word, was semantically related to the word or had no relation to the spoken word. Eye movement data as well as lexical decision latencies were recorded. The results show that participants consistently shifted their gaze to all types of related target pictures, with earlier looks to the identical and phonologically related than to the semantically related targets. Picture-word interference as predicted from previous studies could not be entirely replicated - only the presence of an object identical to the spoken word caused an effect on (reduction in) lexical decision latencies. The interaction between looking behavior and lexical decision latencies is less obvious and will be discussed in detail in the talk.