How speech processing affects our attention to visually similar objects: Shape competitor effects and the visual world paradigm

It was investigated how spoken language is mapped onto the mental representations of objects in the visual field. Specifically, the visual world paradigm was used to test the hypothesis that during 'passive' listening tasks attention is directed more towards objects in the visual field that match the physical shape of the concept of the word concurrently heard than towards objects that do not match on physical shape. Participants listened to sentences containing certain critical target words of concepts with a typical shape (e. g. 'snake') while concurrently viewing a visual display of four objects. We found that participants tended to fixate conceptually unrelated objects with a similar physical shape (e. g. cable) as soon as information from the target word (e. g. 'snake') started to acoustically unfold. The results indicate that (contrary to some priming studies, e. g. Moss et al., 1997) shape information is accessed long before the offset of the spoken word. We discuss the findings with respect to the applicability of the visual world paradigm for the investigation of the access of lexical representations and theories of active vision.