TY  - THES
T1  - The comprehension benefit of noun-contingent eye movements in the visual world
A1  - Steinberg,Juliane
Y1  - 2012/06/05
N2  - When we listen to someone talking, we try, at any given point in time, to make the connection between what is being said and the real world. Language processing incorporates information from various different sources and modalities in order to create an immediate and adequate representation of the conveyed meaning. Language processing also affects the information processing in other modalities, specifically visual perception: looks to entities in one’s visual environment while listening to spoken utterances closely mirror one’s comprehension of referring expressions in the speech stream. This behavior - noun-contingent eye movements - has been observed consistently in psycholinguistic research and has been used as a window into the conceptual layer of the language comprehension process, shedding light onto an extremely wide range of language processing phenomena. The phenomenon of noun-contingent eye movements itself is not yet fully understood though. Drawing back on concepts from spatial indexing, lexical access and priming we motivate the search for and investigation of a beneficial effect of noun-contingent referent looks on the noun’s speed of comprehension.
This thesis utilizes a novel experimental methodology which makes it possible to simultaneously observe and manipulate participants’ inclination to make noun-contingent eye movements as well as record the speed of comprehension for the spoken noun that would trigger these eye movements. This is necessary if one wants to investigate a potential effect of eye movements on noun comprehension. The methodology is a combination of a classical visual-world setting, where participants listen to single spoken nouns and inspect an array of objects that may be related to the noun, and of a lexical decision task which is performed on that spoken noun and assesses the speed of its recognition.
With the experiments presented in this thesis we manage to provide reliable empirical evidence for a beneficial effect of noun-contingent referent looks on the speed of noun comprehension. It is also shown that this benefit arises from the perception of the referent’s visual image (as opposed to the activation of internal referent representations or avoidance of interference from unrelated visual images) during the comprehension of the spoken noun (as opposed to a benefit from the initial recognition and encoding of the referent object). Finally, it is proposed that a spatial-indexing mechanism plays a role in mediating the strength of the effect that the visual image provided by a noun-contingent eye movement can have on the comprehension of the spoken noun.
KW  - Psycholinguistik
KW  - Sprachverstehen
KW  - Blickbewegung
KW  - Priming
KW  - Gesprochene Sprache
CY  - Saarbrücken
PB  - Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek
AD  - Postfach 151141, 66041 Saarbrücken
UR  - http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2012/4870
ER  -