The influence of visual processing on phonetically driven saccades in the “visual world” paradigm

Publisher Summary This chapter presents analyses of a large set of eye–movement data that examine how factors associated with the processing of visual information affect eye movements to displayed pictures during the processing of the referent's name. Eye movements have increasingly become a measure of choice in the study of spoken language comprehension, providing fine-grained information about how the acoustic signal is mapped onto linguistic representations as speech unfolds. Research has established that eye movements are a powerful tool for investigating the processes by which speech is perceived and interpreted, especially the time course of these processes. It is found that phonetically driven fixations are affected by display preview, by the ongoing uptake of visual information, and by the position of pictures in the visual display. Importantly, lexical frequency associated with a picture's name affects the likelihood of refixating this picture and the timing of initiating a saccade away from this picture, thus supporting the use of eye movements as a measure of lexical processing. The chapter also describes how the display might influence lexical processing and help mitigate concerns about potential task-specific strategies. The results are encouraging for researchers who want to exploit the properties of the eye-tracking paradigm to explore issues of representation and process in spoken-word recognition.