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Can Speaker Gaze Modulate Syntactic Structuring and Thematic Role Assignment during Spoken Sentence Comprehension?

Overview of attention for article published in Frontiers in Psychology, January 2012
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Title
Can Speaker Gaze Modulate Syntactic Structuring and Thematic Role Assignment during Spoken Sentence Comprehension?
Published in
Frontiers in Psychology, January 2012
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00538
Pubmed ID
Authors

Pia Knoeferle, Helene Kreysa

Abstract

During comprehension, a listener can rapidly follow a frontally seated speaker's gaze to an object before its mention, a behavior which can shorten latencies in speeded sentence verification. However, the robustness of gaze-following, its interaction with core comprehension processes such as syntactic structuring, and the persistence of its effects are unclear. In two "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments participants watched a video of a speaker, seated at an angle, describing transitive (non-depicted) actions between two of three Second Life characters on a computer screen. Sentences were in German and had either subject(NP1)-verb-object(NP2) or object(NP1)-verb-subject(NP2) structure; the speaker either shifted gaze to the NP2 character or was obscured. Several seconds later, participants verified either the sentence referents or their role relations. When participants had seen the speaker's gaze shift, they anticipated the NP2 character before its mention and earlier than when the speaker was obscured. This effect was more pronounced for SVO than OVS sentences in both tasks. Interactions of speaker gaze and sentence structure were more pervasive in role-relations verification: participants verified the role relations faster for SVO than OVS sentences, and faster when they had seen the speaker shift gaze than when the speaker was obscured. When sentence and template role-relations matched, gaze-following even eliminated the SVO-OVS response-time differences. Thus, gaze-following is robust even when the speaker is seated at an angle to the listener; it varies depending on the syntactic structure and thematic role relations conveyed by a sentence; and its effects can extend to delayed post-sentence comprehension processes. These results suggest that speaker gaze effects contribute pervasively to visual attention and comprehension processes and should thus be accommodated by accounts of situated language comprehension.

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Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 67 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Netherlands 1 1%
Germany 1 1%
Unknown 65 97%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Ph. D. Student 18 27%
Researcher 11 16%
Student > Master 10 15%
Student > Doctoral Student 7 10%
Student > Bachelor 4 6%
Other 10 15%
Unknown 7 10%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Psychology 25 37%
Linguistics 16 24%
Neuroscience 6 9%
Computer Science 3 4%
Medicine and Dentistry 3 4%
Other 5 7%
Unknown 9 13%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 05 December 2012.
All research outputs
#20,174,175
of 22,687,320 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Psychology
#23,790
of 29,416 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#221,217
of 244,125 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#406
of 481 outputs
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