The role of visual and executive attention in language comprehension and production

Speakers: Antje S. Meyer and Debra Malpass

 

Affiliation: University of Birmingham, a.s.meyer@bham.ac.uk

 

Title: The role of visual and executive attention in language comprehension and production

Abstract:

The registration of eye movements has become quite popular in several areas of psycholinguistics, including reading, spoken language processing, speech production and language acquisition. Much of this research does not aim to study vision or oculomotor control, but rather to gain insights about when and for how long readers, listeners or speakers attend to different stimuli. In the talk, we discuss the potential of this research strategy.

 

We distinguish between visual and executive attention. We will first discuss the relationship between eye gaze and visual attention in reading, speech production and comprehension. We will then turn to the role of executive attention in these domains and discuss how executive attention is related to visual attention and to eye movements. We will argue that eye movements provide us with clear information about the focus of a person's visual attention, but that the relationship to the allocation of executive attention is much more opaque.