Degree of conceptual overlap affects eye movements in visual world paradigm

ABSTRACT

Several studies employing the visual world paradigm have shown that people will look at visual objects having a semantic relationship with spoken words. However, it remains unclear how eye movements are controlled in the visual world paradigm. The present study examined how listeners guide their eyes in the visual world paradigm by distinguishing the conceptual overlap hypothesis and the uncertainty reduction hypothesis. The uncertainty of the spoken words and the degree of conceptual overlap between visual objects and spoken words were manipulated by varying the spoken words across different hierarchical levels. The result showed that participants looked at the target objects more often when there was greater conceptual overlap between visual objects and spoken words, suggesting that the degree of conceptual overlap between spoken words and visual objects is the major factor that determines the probability of looking at a target object.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual attention
• conceptual overlap
• visual world paradigm
• eye movements
• spoken language comprehension

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data and materials that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aq3NVEQIAHB-3h2YuJMx_sUCML4z?e=ZEeCpn.

Additional information

Funding

This work was jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Project Crossmodal Learning, NSFC 61621136008/DFG TRR-169. This research was also supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31970992].