Representations of spatial location in language processing
Item Status
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Date
Authors
Abstract
The
production
or
comprehension
of
linguistic
information
is
often
not
an
isolated
task
decoupled
from
the
visual
environment.
Rather,
people
refer
to
objects
or
listen
to
other
people
describing
objects
around
them.
Previous
studies
have
shown
that
in
such
situations
people
either
fixate
these
objects,
often
multiple
times
(Cooper,
1974),
or
they
attend
to
the
objects
much
longer
than
is
required
for
mere
identification
(Meyer,
Sleiderink,
&
Levelt,
1998).
Most
interestingly,
during
comprehension
people
also
attend
to
the
location
of
objects
even
when
those
objects
were
removed
(Altmann,
2004).
The
main
focus
of
this
thesis
was
to
investigate
the
role
of
the
spatial
location
of
objects
during
language
processing.
The
first
part
of
the
thesis
tested
whether
attention
to
objects’
former
locations
facilitates
language
production
and
comprehension
processes
(Experiments
1-‐5).
In
two
initial
eye-‐tracking
experiments,
participants
were
instructed
to
name
objects
that
either
changed
their
positions
(Experiment
1)
or
were
withdrawn
from
the
computer
screen
(Experiment
2)
during
language
production.
Production
was
impaired
when
speakers
did
not
attend
to
the
original
position
of
the
objects.
Most
interestingly,
fixating
an
empty
region
in
which
an
object
was
located
resulted
in
faster
articulation
and
initiation
times.
During
the
language
comprehension
tasks,
participants
were
instructed
to
evaluate
facts
presented
by
talking
heads
appearing
in
different
positions
on
the
computer
screen.
During
evaluation,
the
talking
heads
changed
position
(Experiment
3)
or
were
withdrawn
from
the
screen
(Experiments
4-‐5).
People
showed
a
strong
tendency
to
gaze
at
the
centre
of
the
screen
and
only
moved
towards
the
head’s
former
locations
if
the
screen
was
empty
and
if
evaluation
was
not
preceded
by
an
intervening
task
as
tested
in
Experiment
5.
Fixating
the
former
location
resulted
in
faster
response
time
but
not
in
better
accuracy
of
evaluation.
The
second
part
of
this
thesis
investigated
the
role
of
spatial
location
representations
in
reading
(Experiments
6-‐7).
Specifically,
I
examined
to
what extent
people
reading
garden-‐path
sentences
regress
to
specific
target
words
in
order
to
reanalyse
the
sentences.
The
results
of
two
eye-‐tracking
experiments
showed
that
readers
do
not
target
very
precisely.
A
spatial
representation
is
used,
but
it
appears
to
be
fairly
coarse
(i.e.,
only
represents
whether
information
is
to
the
left
or
to
the
right
of
fixation).
The
findings
from
this
thesis
give
us
a
clearer
understanding
of
the
influence
of
spatial
location
information
on
language
processing.
In
language
production
particularly,
it
appears
that
spatial
location
is
an
integral
part
of
the
cognitive
model
and
strongly
connected
with
linguistic
and
visual
representations.
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