Eye movements during the production of nouns and pronouns

Meulen, Femke F. van der; Meyer, Antje S.; Levelt, Willem J. M.

doi:10.3758/bf03196402

Cited by 39 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Supporting this hypothesis, Van Der Meulen et al (2001) found that speakers do not always look at the objects they name: speakers allocate less visual attention to given objects than to new ones, and less visual attention to objects they will refer to with a pronoun than with a full noun phrase. This suggests that discourse focus (given vs. new) and referential form (pronoun vs. name) modulate the amount of visual attention allocated to a referent.…”

Section: Variation In the Production Of Contextually-appropriate Langmentioning

confidence: 59%

Discourse attention during utterance planning affects referential form choice

Zerkle

Arnold

2016

Linguistics Vanguard

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Abstract:An unstudied source of linguistic variation is the use of discourse-appropriate language. Sometimes individuals use linguistic devices (anaphors, connectors) to connect utterances to the discourse context, and sometimes not. We asked how this variation is related to utterance planning, using eyetracking with a narrative production task. Participants saw picture pairs depicting two events. They heard a description of the first event (Context picture), then added to the story by describing the second event (Target picture). We found that one group of participants produced utterances that connected with the discourse context (Context-Users), using pronouns/zeros and connectors (and/then) as appropriate, while another group consistently used definite NP descriptions and virtually no connectors (Context-Ignorers). Eyetracking measures reflected utterance planning within a discourse context: all participants shifted their attention from the Context picture to the Target picture throughout a trial. We also observed group differences: Context-Users directed their attention in a more systematic way than Context-Ignorers. At trial onset, Context-Users looked more at the Context picture than Context-Ignorers. Right before speaking, they looked more at the Target picture than Context-Ignorers. The Context-Users also had shorter latency to begin speaking. This study provides a first step toward characterizing individual differences in terms of utterance planning.

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Section: Variation In the Production Of Contextually-appropriate Langmentioning

confidence: 59%

Discourse attention during utterance planning affects referential form choice

Zerkle

Arnold

2016

Linguistics Vanguard

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“…Speakers spent more time gazing at patients and agents than elsewhere, which resulted in a significant main effect 1 Short movies illustrating the timing of speech and eye movements in these experiments are available at http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/ϳzgriffin/ If gaze durations reflect the difficulty of name preparation, then the repeated use of blick should have made the novel word easier to produce across the experiment, especially relative to generating accurate names without the benefit of repetition. Indeed, previous research has demonstrated that speakers generally spend less time gazing at objects when repeating their (accurate) names (Van Der Meulen, Meyer, & Levelt, 2001). We tested whether this also held for novel names with no association to their referents.…”

Section: Novel Word Labelsmentioning

confidence: 85%

Speakers gaze at objects while preparing intentionally inaccurate labels for them.

Griffin¹,

Oppenheimer²

2006

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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When describing scenes, speakers gaze at objects while preparing their names (Z. M. Griffin & K. Bock, 2000). In this study, the authors investigated whether gazes to referents occurred in the absence of a correspondence between visual features and word meaning. Speakers gazed significantly longer at objects before intentionally labeling them inaccurately with the names of similar things (e.g., calling a horse a dog) than when labeling them accurately. This held for grammatical subjects and objects as well as agents and patients. Moreover, the time spent gazing at a referent before labeling it with a novel word or accurate name was similar and decreased as speakers gained experience using the novel word. These results suggest that visual attention in speaking may be directed toward referents in the absence of any association between their visual forms and the words used to talk about them.

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“…VTs were also longer for objects named with a full noun than for objects named with a pronoun (such as ''it''; ref. 55). Taken together, these data suggest that the speaker keeps visually attending to the target object until phonological encoding, including syllabification, is complete (50).…”

Section: Coordinating Lexical Selection and Form Encoding During Uttementioning

confidence: 88%

Spoken word production: A theory of lexical access

Levelt

2001

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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383

287

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A core operation in speech production is the preparation of words from a semantic base. The theory of lexical access reviewed in this article covers a sequence of processing stages beginning with the speaker's focusing on a target concept and ending with the initiation of articulation. The initial stages of preparation are concerned with lexical selection, which is zooming in on the appropriate lexical item in the mental lexicon. The following stages concern form encoding, i.e., retrieving a word's morphemic phonological codes, syllabifying the word, and accessing the corresponding articulatory gestures. The theory is based on chronometric measurements of spoken word production, obtained, for instance, in picture-naming tasks. The theory is largely computationally implemented. It provides a handle on the analysis of multiword utterance production as well as a guide to the analysis and design of neuroimaging studies of spoken utterance production.T he human ability to speak is universal. All normal children acquire the language of their environment at a very early age. Most start babbling at the age of 7 months, produce a few meaningful words around their first birthday, reach a 50-word vocabulary 6 months later, produce their first multiword utterances by the end of their second year of life, and begin expressing syntactic relations by means of prepositions, auxiliaries, inflections, and word order in the course of their third year. By the age of 5 or 6, the basic architecture of this natural skill is essentially in place. Although our ability to speak has since millennia been recognized as uniquely human, as species-specific, as the basis of our cultural evolution, and generally as a core aspect of the human condition (homo loquens), the systematic study of how we speak did not begin before the end of the 19th century. In 1900, Wilhelm Wundt (1) published his theory about how a sentence emerges in the speaker's mind, a theory entirely based on introspection. With their 1896 monograph, Meringer and Mayer (2) initiated an important empirical paradigm. They collected and analyzed a large corpus of spontaneously produced speech errors that they had carefully noted down. One of their findings was that word substitutions were either meaning-based [e.g., Ihre (your) for meine (mine)] or form-based [e.g., Studien (studies) for Stunden (hours)], suggesting a distinction between meaningand form-based operations in word generation. It was only by the 1970s that this paradigm became fully exploited to construct theories of utterance generation (see ref. 3 for a review).

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Eye movements during the production of nouns and pronouns

Cited by 39 publications

References 14 publications

Discourse attention during utterance planning affects referential form choice

Discourse attention during utterance planning affects referential form choice

Speakers gaze at objects while preparing intentionally inaccurate labels for them.

Spoken word production: A theory of lexical access

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