Meyer Antje S, Wheeldon Linda, van der Meulen Femke, Konopka Agnieszka
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2012 Feb 20;3:39. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00039. eCollection 2012.
Earlier studies had shown that speakers naming several objects typically look at each object until they have retrieved the phonological form of its name and therefore look longer at objects with long names than at objects with shorter names. We examined whether this tight eye-to-speech coordination was maintained at different speech rates and after increasing amounts of practice. Participants named the same set of objects with monosyllabic or disyllabic names on up to 20 successive trials. In Experiment 1, they spoke as fast as they could, whereas in Experiment 2 they had to maintain a fixed moderate or faster speech rate. In both experiments, the durations of the gazes to the objects decreased with increasing speech rate, indicating that at higher speech rates, the speakers spent less time planning the object names. The eye-speech lag (the time interval between the shift of gaze away from an object and the onset of its name) was independent of the speech rate but became shorter with increasing practice. Consistent word length effects on the durations of the gazes to the objects and the eye-speech lags were only found in Experiment 2. The results indicate that shifts of eye gaze are often linked to the completion of phonological encoding, but that speakers can deviate from this default coordination of eye gaze and speech, for instance when the descriptive task is easy and they aim to speak fast.
早期研究表明，说话者在说出多个物体的名称时，通常会看着每个物体，直到检索到其名称的语音形式，因此，与名称较短的物体相比，他们看名称较长的物体的时间更长。我们研究了在不同语速下以及随着练习量的增加，这种紧密的眼-语协调是否会保持。参与者连续进行多达20次试验，用单音节或双音节名称说出同一组物体。在实验1中，他们尽可能快地说话，而在实验2中，他们必须保持固定的中等语速或更快的语速。在两个实验中，对物体注视的持续时间都随着语速的增加而减少，这表明在较高语速下，说话者在计划物体名称上花费的时间更少。眼-语延迟（即注视从物体移开到其名称开始之间的时间间隔）与语速无关，但随着练习的增加而变短。仅在实验2中发现了一致的词长效应，即对物体注视的持续时间和眼-语延迟。结果表明，目光转移通常与语音编码的完成有关，但说话者可以偏离这种默认的眼-语协调，例如当描述任务容易且他们旨在快速说话时。
