No abstract

The present study was designed to determine if there is a facilitating effect of aural vs visual linguistic input in comprehension of a sentence which expresses a spatial relationship between objects in a picture, e.g., "Star is above square." The sample was composed of 10 male and 10 female undergraduate students in psychology. One group was presented with sentences aurally to compare with tachistoscopically presented pictures, while another was presented written sentences along with pictures. The main finding was that reaction times were significantly less in the auditory group than the visual group, while there was no statistically significant difference in errors. Several previous findings relating to the characteristics of sentence types were replicated. It was concluded that several alternative strategies are made possible when stimuli are presented aurally which are probably due to the compatibility of listening and looking tasks.

If oculomotor activity in verifying orally presented sentences about pictures is important, then there ought to be an increase in such activity in the area of a picture in which a critical feature in the analysis is missing. If the process is purely cognitive, there ought not be greater activity in that area. 32 sentences combining such attributes as positive/negative, true/false, subject of sentence shown/not shown, "before"/"after," resulting in sentences such as, "Star isn't before square," were orally presented to 10 college-age students along with tachistoscopically presented pictures with either an object on the right or left. True/false reaction times were recorded as well as horizontal eye fixations for the time interval via an electromyograph and chart recorder. Mean eye-location/time indices indicated that some sentence types seemed to be analyzed predominantly visually and others predominantly cognitively. Results suggested that there is a need for the development of a combined visual imagery and cognitive model.