Rommers Joost, Meyer Antje S, Huettig Falk
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2015 Apr;77(3):720-30. doi: 10.3758/s13414-015-0873-x.
During language comprehension, listeners often anticipate upcoming information. This can draw listeners' overt attention to visually presented objects before the objects are referred to. We investigated to what extent the anticipatory mechanisms involved in such language-mediated attention rely on specific verbal factors and on processes shared with other domains of cognition. Participants listened to sentences ending in a highly predictable word (e.g., "In 1969 Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon") while viewing displays containing three unrelated distractor objects and a critical object, which was either the target object (e.g., a moon), an object with a similar shape (e.g., a tomato), or an unrelated control object (e.g., rice). Language-mediated anticipatory eye movements were observed to targets and to shape competitors. Importantly, looks to the shape competitor were systematically related to individual differences in anticipatory attention, as indexed by a spatial cueing task: Participants whose responses were most strongly facilitated by predictive arrow cues also showed the strongest effects of predictive language input on their eye movements. By contrast, looks to the target were related to individual differences in vocabulary size and verbal fluency. The results suggest that verbal and nonverbal factors contribute to different types of language-mediated eye movements. The findings are consistent with multiple-mechanism accounts of predictive language processing.
在语言理解过程中，听众常常会预测即将出现的信息。这可能会在相关物体被提及之前，将听众的显性注意力吸引到视觉呈现的物体上。我们研究了这种语言介导的注意力中涉及的预测机制在多大程度上依赖于特定的语言因素以及与其他认知领域共有的过程。参与者在观看包含三个不相关干扰物体和一个关键物体的展示时，聆听以高度可预测的单词结尾的句子（例如，“1969年，尼尔·阿姆斯特朗是第一个踏上月球的人”），关键物体要么是目标物体（例如，一个月球）、形状相似的物体（例如，一个西红柿），要么是不相关的对照物体（例如，大米）。观察到语言介导的预测性眼动会指向目标物体和形状相似的竞争物体。重要的是，看向形状相似竞争物体的眼动与预测性注意力的个体差异存在系统性关联，这种个体差异通过空间线索任务来衡量：那些对预测性箭头线索反应最强烈的参与者，其预测性语言输入对眼动的影响也最为显著。相比之下，看向目标物体的眼动与词汇量和语言流畅性的个体差异有关。结果表明，语言和非语言因素对不同类型的语言介导眼动都有贡献。这些发现与预测性语言处理的多机制解释相一致。
