Implicit Labelling and Readiness for Pronunciation during the Perceptual Process

Abstract

The authors assume that during the visual perception of labelable objects there occurs an implicit labelling which gives rise to a readiness for pronunciation, and that the two phenomena are involved in stimulus processing. In order to test these assumptions, the duration of eye fixation on drawing representing familiar objects was measured. The data show that on an average this duration was longer when the name for the object required four or five syllables to pronounce than when it required only one syllable. This syllable effect was observed in various experimental conditions where possible effects of other variables could be controlled. The effect obtained irrespective of whether or not the subjects were allowed to see the drawings before the experiment, and of whether or not they were allowed to go through the list of names for the objects.

Synchronizing Visual and Language Processing: An Effect of Object Name Length on Eye Movements

“…The current study provides further evidence for visual-verbal synchronization by both establishing boundary conditions on when such synchrony might be expected and addressing problems in Noizet and Pynte's (1976) study that cloud the interpretation of this earlier work.…”

“…Two selection criteria in addition to name length were followed. First, the selected items averaged 93% name agreement in both length conditions (Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980), eliminating one of the problems Noizet and Pynte (1976) discovered in their stimuli. Second, the items selected were equated for ease of identification using a standard categorization pretest based on the procedure followed by Murphy and Brownell (1985).…”

“…Although intriguing, Noizet and Pynte's (1976) study had several shortcomings. First, because their subjects were not assigned a task, it is unclear whether and to what extent subjects were identifying the objects.…”

“…In a study similar to our own, Noizet and Pynte (1976;see also Pynte, 1974) investigated whether this relationship between object naming and viewing behavior is obligatory. They did this by instructing subjects to serially shift their gaze to a set of three objects and to silently identify each in turn.…”

Phonological similarity effects on detecting change in simple arrays

“…The results of these experiments confirmed the findings of others that subjects tend to use verbal encoding strategies spontaneously when faced with simple short-term memory (STM) tasks (Avons & Phillips, 1987;Conrad, 1964;Noizet & Pynte, 1976;Zelinsky & Murphy, 2000). Zelinsky and Murphy, for example, found that subjects employed an implicit naming strategy when encoding objects for later recognition, and that this acted as an oculomotor constraint on visual inspection: Pictures with longer names were fixated longer than pictures with shorter names.…”