PDF《Semantic information mediates visual attention during spoken...》

1 Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,

16 Lincui Road, Beijing, China

2 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China Atten Percept Psychophys (2016) 78:1267C1284 DOI 10.3758/s13414-016-1081-z Moreover, the onset-match phonological competitor ( bee- tle ) attracted more and earlier fixations than did the offset- match phonological competitor ( speaker ). These findings were in line with the assumptions of the TRACE model of spoken word recognition (McClelland &

Elman, 1986), which assumes that a set of word candidates sharing the same sylla- bles as target words are activated temporarily upon hearing a spoken word. More importantly, these findings also showed that a match established at the phonological level can drive attention shifts to visual objects, and that the phonological information of a spoken word is gradually mapped onto fix- ated objects during spoken word recognition (Dahan, Magnuson, Tanenhaus, &

Hogan, 2001). Evidence from the visual-world paradigm indicates that attention shifts to visual objects are driven not only by pho- nological information, but also by matches built at the seman- tic level. For example, in Huettig and Altmann (2005), partic- ipants were asked to listen to a sentence that included a target word (e.g., piano ) while looking at a visual display of four objects without performing any explicit task. Huettig and Altmann found that the fixation probabilities on semantically related objects (e.g., trumpet ) were significantly higher than those on unrelated objects. The authors argued that the seman- tic representation of piano was activated on hearing the spoken target word, and that semantic information regarding the visual object trumpet was also activated at the same time. On the basis of this finding, they proposed that semantic overlap between the two semantic representations resulted in a visual attention shift. Huettig and McQueen (2007) investigated the time course of information processing during spoken word recognition. In that study, participants saw four visual object competitors and heard a spoken target word beaker embedded in a neutral context sentence, such as eventually she looked at the beaker that was in front of her. They found that the proportions of fixations on the three competitors (a phonological competitor, a semantic competitor, and a shape competitor) were all sig- nificantly higher than that........