Zelinsky G J, Murphy G L
Department of Psychology, Psych B Bldg., Room 240, SUNY Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-2500, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2000 Mar;11(2):125-31. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00227.
Are visual and verbal processing systems functionally independent? Two experiments (one using line drawings of common objects, the other using faces) explored the relationship between the number of syllables in an object's name (one or three) and the visual inspection of that object. The tasks were short-term recognition and visual search. Results indicated more fixations and longer gaze durations on objects having three-syllable names when the task encouraged a verbal encoding of the objects (i.e., recognition). No effects of syllable length on eye movements were found when implicit naming demands were minimal (i.e., visual search). These findings suggest that implicitly naming a pictorial object constrains the oculomotor inspection of that object, and that the visual and verbal encoding of an object are synchronized so that the faster process must wait for the slower to be completed before gaze shifts to another object. Both findings imply a tight coupling between visual and linguistic processing, and highlight the utility of an oculomotor methodology to understand this coupling.
视觉和语言处理系统在功能上是独立的吗？两项实验（一项使用常见物体的线条图，另一项使用面部）探究了物体名称的音节数量（一个或三个）与该物体视觉检查之间的关系。任务包括短期识别和视觉搜索。结果表明，当任务鼓励对物体进行语言编码时（即识别），对具有三个音节名称的物体有更多的注视点和更长的注视持续时间。当隐性命名需求最小时（即视觉搜索），未发现音节长度对眼动有影响。这些发现表明，对图片物体进行隐性命名会限制对该物体的眼动检查，并且物体的视觉和语言编码是同步的，因此较快的过程必须等待较慢的过程完成后，注视才会转移到另一个物体上。这两个发现都意味着视觉和语言处理之间存在紧密的耦合，并突出了眼动方法在理解这种耦合方面的效用。
