I see what you're saying: The integration of complex speech and scenes during language comprehension

Abstract

The effect of language-driven eye movements in a visual scene with concurrent speech was examined using complex linguistic stimuli and complex scenes. The processing demands were manipulated using speech rate and the temporal distance between mentioned objects. This experiment differs from previous research by using complex photographic scenes, three-sentence utterances and mentioning four target objects. The main finding was that objects that are more slowly mentioned, more evenly placed and isolated in the speech stream are more likely to be fixated after having been mentioned and are fixated faster. Surprisingly, even objects mentioned in the most demanding conditions still show an effect of language-driven eye-movements. This supports research using concurrent speech and visual scenes, and shows that the behavior of matching visual and linguistic information is likely to generalize to language situations of high information load.