Speech-contingent eye movements
Speaker: Juliane Steinberg
Institution: Saarland University
Abstract:
There exists a close connection between linguistic and visual processing that has been exploited in psycholinguistic research for more than a decade. This connection shows in speech-contingent eye movements (SCEs): we observe a very strong tendency with people to fixate objects in their visual surroundings at points in time when we can assume that words relating to these objects are being processed linguistically. This behavior can be observed reliably and has yielded many insights into word and sentence processing, especially into their time courses. It is still not fully understood, however, why eye movements are that closely related to speech processing, whether this behavior occurs only under specific circumstances, or how exactly the two modalities interact. These are the kinds of questions that I work with in my PhD. I will present the results of an experiment on eye movements during verb comprehension. This experiment was conducted to extend the notion of verb-contingent eye movements beyond the anticipation of yet to be mentioned arguments. We had participants listen to sentences in which potential arguments were named before the verb. At the verb we observed refixations of that verb's arguments. We conclude that verb-contingent eye movements reflect verb-argument integration. In the second main part of the presentation I will describe the plans for another eye-tracking experiment, which examines the functionality of SCEs. Participants will find themselves in a situation where they are instructed to fulfil two tasks at the same time: one tasks forces them to look at a certain object, while the other task, listening to a sentence, should trigger SCEs to a different object. Performance measures from both tasks will allow us to assess, for example, whether SCEs ease linguistic processing.