Gaze durations during speech reflect word selection and phonological encoding

Abstract

Speakers produced the sentence frame The A and the B are above the C to describe three pictured objects while their eye movements were monitored. Object B or C varied in codability (the number of alternative names for it) and in the frequency of its dominant name. Codability is known to affect speed of word selection, and word frequency, speed to retrieve a word's pronunciation (phonological encoding). Speakers gazed longer at lower codability and lower frequency objects before naming them. However, the codability and frequency of B and C did not affect when speakers began naming A, even when utterances were perfectly fluent. The results indicate that speakers began "The A..." once they had a name prepared for A, before selecting names for B and C. Similar gaze patterns during less constrained scene description tasks in other studies suggest that speakers often incrementally select and phonologically encode nouns in fluent utterances.

Horizontal Information Flow in Spoken Sentence Production.

“…Because there is evidence that semantic interference effects only arise during lemma access (e.g., Damian et al, 2001; and not during conceptual planning (e.g., Schriefers et al, 1990), such a finding may suggest that there is a temporal overlap in the access of lemmas at opposite ends of the clause. This in turn would seem to contradict the many recent studies that have provided evidence for incremental lemma access (e.g., Griffin, 2001;Griffin & Bock, 2000;Levelt & Maassen, 1981;Martin, Katz, & Freedman, 1998;Meyer et al, 1998;Meyer & Van der Meulen, 2000;Schriefers, de Ruiter, & Steigerwald, 1999;Schriefers, Teruel, & Meinshausen, 1999;Smith & Wheeldon, 1999, 2001; although see Ferreira & Swets, 2001, for evidence of nonincremental access). In fact, however, such findings are not irreconcilable.…”

Tracing attention and the activation flow in spoken word planning using eye movements.

“…Research on spoken word planning has shown that there is a close link between phonological activation and gaze shifting in picture naming (e.g., A. S. Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998;Griffin, 2001), whereby gaze shifts index shifts of attention (Roelofs, 2007). For example, when speakers are asked to name two objects in a row, they look longer at first-to-be-named objects with two-versus one-syllable names even when the object recognition times are the same (A. S. Meyer, Roelofs, & Levelt, 2003).…”

Processing of Extrafoveal Objects During Multiple-Object Naming.

“…As we explained earlier, the name of an object will be activated only if the corresponding concept is sufficiently activated (e.g., Humphreys & Forde, 2001). This, in turn, may presuppose that the object is attended to (for further discussion, see, e.g., Germeys et al, 2002;Henderson & Hollingworth, 2003;Henderson & Siefert, 1999, 2001Rensink, 2000aRensink, , 2000b. Whether conceptual activation is sufficient for name activation, as some cascaded models of speech production assume (e.g., Caramazza, 1997;Humphreys, Riddoch, & Quinlan, 1988; but see Bloem & La Heij, 2003), or whether name activation only occurs when the viewer selects the concept and the corresponding lexical unit to be part of an utterance plan, as serial stage models assume (e.g., Levelt et al, 1999), remains to be seen (see Damian & Bowers, 2003;Morsella & Miozzo, 2002, for further discussion).…”