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Eye Movements and Lexical Access in Spoken-Language Comprehension: Evaluating a Linking Hypothesis between Fixations and Linguistic Processing

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Abstract

A growing number of researchers in the sentence processing community are using eye movements to address issues in spoken language comprehension. Experiments using this paradigm have shown that visually presented referential information, including properties of referents relevant to specific actions, influences even the earliest moments of syntactic processing. Methodological concerns about task-specific strategies and the linking hypothesis between eye movements and linguistic processing are identified and discussed. These concerns are addressed in a review of recent studies of spoken word recognition which introduce and evaluate a detailed linking hypothesis between eye movements and lexical access. The results provide evidence about the time course of lexical activation that resolves some important theoretical issues in spoken-word recognition. They also demonstrate that fixations are sensitive to properties of the normal language-processing system that cannot be attributed to task-specific strategies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, 14627

    Michael K. Tanenhaus

  2. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, 14627

    James S. Magnuson & Craig Chambers

  3. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Postbus 310, 6500 AH, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Delphine Dahan

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  1. Michael K. Tanenhaus
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  2. James S. Magnuson
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  3. Delphine Dahan
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  4. Craig Chambers
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Tanenhaus, M.K., Magnuson, J.S., Dahan, D. et al. Eye Movements and Lexical Access in Spoken-Language Comprehension: Evaluating a Linking Hypothesis between Fixations and Linguistic Processing. J Psycholinguist Res 29, 557–580 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026464108329

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