Spoken language comprehension: insights from eye movements

2007 ◽  
pp. 308-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Tanenhaus
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Language Production ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Response Measure ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension

Recently, eye movements have become a widely used response measure for studying spoken language processing in both adults and children, in situations where participants comprehend and generate utterances about a circumscribed “Visual World” while fixation is monitored, typically using a free-view eye-tracker. Psycholinguists now use the Visual World eye-movement method to study both language production and language comprehension, in studies that run the gamut of current topics in language processing. Eye movements are a response measure of choice for addressing many classic questions about spoken language processing in psycholinguistics. This article reviews the burgeoning Visual World literature on language comprehension, highlighting some of the seminal studies and examining how the Visual World approach has contributed new insights to our understanding of spoken word recognition, parsing, reference resolution, and interactive conversation. It considers some of the methodological issues that come to the fore when psycholinguists use eye movements to examine spoken language comprehension.

Activation and Persistence of Implicit Causality Information in Spoken Language Comprehension

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirita Pyykkönen ◽  
Juhani Järvikivi
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Implicit Causality ◽  
Causality Information ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension

A visual world eye-tracking study investigated the activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. We showed that people infer the implicit causality of verbs as soon as they encounter such verbs in discourse, as is predicted by proponents of the immediate focusing account ( Greene & McKoon, 1995 ; Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006 ; Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, & Nieuwland, 2007 ). Interestingly, we observed activation of implicit causality information even before people encountered the causal conjunction. However, while implicit causality information was persistent as the discourse unfolded, it did not have a privileged role as a focusing cue immediately at the ambiguous pronoun when people were resolving its antecedent. Instead, our study indicated that implicit causality does not affect all referents to the same extent, rather it interacts with other cues in the discourse, especially when one of the referents is already prominently in focus.

Eye movements as a window into real-time spoken language comprehension in natural contexts

1995 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 409-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Eberhard ◽  
Michael J. Spivey-Knowlton ◽  
Julie C. Sedivy ◽  
Michael K. Tanenhaus
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension

Activating Gender Stereotypes During Online Spoken Language Processing

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirita Pyykkönen ◽  
Jukka Hyönä ◽  
Roger P. G. van Gompel
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Mental Models ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Tracking Method ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
Coherence Relation

This study used the visual world eye-tracking method to investigate activation of general world knowledge related to gender-stereotypical role names in online spoken language comprehension in Finnish. The results showed that listeners activated gender stereotypes elaboratively in story contexts where this information was not needed to build coherence. Furthermore, listeners made additional inferences based on gender stereotypes to revise an already established coherence relation. Both results are consistent with mental models theory (e.g., Garnham, 2001 ). They are harder to explain by the minimalist account ( McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992 ), which suggests that people limit inferences to those needed to establish coherence in discourse.

Eye Tracking and Spoken Language Comprehension

2017 ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Kaplan ◽  
Tatyana Levari ◽  
Jesse Snedeker
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Developmental Disorders ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension

Constructing a more precise and deeper understanding of how listeners, and particularly young children, comprehend spoken language is a primary focus for both psycholinguists and educators alike. This chapter highlights how, over the course of the past 20 years, eye tracking has become a crucial and widely used methodology to gain insight into online spoken language comprehension. We address how various eye-tracking paradigms have informed current theories of language comprehension across the processing stream, focusing on lexical discrimination, syntactic analysis, and pragmatic inferences. Additionally, this chapter aims to bridge the gap between psycholinguistic research and educational topics, such as how early linguistic experiences influence later educational outcomes and ways in which eye-tracking methods can provide additional insight into the language processing of children with developmental disorders.

scholarly journals Fronto-temporal brain systems supporting spoken language comprehension

2007 ◽  
Vol 363 (1493) ◽  
pp. 1037-1054 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine K Tyler ◽  
William Marslen-Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
Connectivity Analysis ◽  
Sentence Level ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension

The research described here combines psycholinguistically well-motivated questions about different aspects of human language comprehension with behavioural and neuroimaging studies of normal performance, incorporating both subtractive analysis techniques and functional connectivity methods, and applying these tasks and techniques to the analysis of the functional and neural properties of brain-damaged patients with selective linguistic deficits in the relevant domains. The results of these investigations point to a set of partially dissociable sub-systems supporting three major aspects of spoken language comprehension, involving regular inflectional morphology, sentence-level syntactic analysis and sentence-level semantic interpretation. Differential patterns of fronto-temporal connectivity for these three domains confirm that the core aspects of language processing are carried out in a fronto-temporo-parietal language system which is modulated in different ways as a function of different linguistic processing requirements. No one region or sub-region holds the key to a specific language function; each requires the coordination of activity within a number of different regions. Functional connectivity analysis plays the critical role of indicating the regions which directly participate in a given sub-process, by virtue of their joint time-dependent activity. By revealing these codependencies, connectivity analysis sharpens the pattern of structure–function relations underlying specific aspects of language performance.

Using Eye-Movements to Monitor Spoken Language Comprehension

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Tanenhaus ◽  
Michael Spiveyknowlton ◽  
Kathleen M. Eberhard ◽  
Julie Sedivy
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension
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