The pictures who shall not be named: Empirical support for benefits of preview in the Visual World Paradigm

Abstract

A common critique of the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) in psycholinguistic studies is that what is designed as a measure of language processes is meaningfully altered by the visual context of the task. This is crucial, particularly in studies of spoken word recognition, where the displayed images are usually seen as just a part of the measure and are not of fundamental interest. Many variants of the VWP allow participants to sample the visual scene before a trial begins. However, this could bias their interpretations of the later speech or even lead to abnormal processing strategies (e.g., comparing the input to only preactivated working memory representations). Prior work has focused only on whether preview duration changes fixation patterns. However, preview could affect a number of processes, such as visual search, that would not challenge the interpretation of the VWP. The present study uses a series of targeted manipulations of the preview period to ask if preview alters looking behavior during a trial, and why. Results show that evidence of incremental processing and phonological competition seen in the VWP are not dependent on preview, and are not enhanced by manipulations that directly encourage phonological prenaming. Moreover, some forms of preview can eliminate nuisance variance deriving from object recognition and visual search demands in order to produce a more sensitive measure of linguistic processing. These results deepen our understanding of how the visual scene interacts with language processing to drive fixations patterns in the VWP, and reinforce the value of the VWP as a tool for measuring real-time language processing. Stimuli, data and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/b7q65/.