Abstract
Research on language production has focused on the process of utterance planning and involved studying the synchronization between visual gaze and the production of sentences that refer to objects in the immediate visual environment. However, it remains unclear how the visual grouping of these objects might influence this process. To shed light on this issue, the present research examined the effects of the visual grouping of objects in a visual display on utterance planning in two experiments. Participants produced utterances of the form “The snail and the necklace are above/below/on the left/right side of the toothbrush” for objects containing these referents (e.g., a snail, a necklace and a toothbrush). These objects were grouped using classic Gestalt principles of color similarity (Experiment 1) and common region (Experiment 2) so that the induced perceptual grouping was congruent or incongruent with the required phrasal organization. The results showed that speech onset latencies were shorter in congruent than incongruent conditions. The findings therefore reveal that the congruency between the visual grouping of referents and the required phrasal organization can influence speech production. Such findings suggest that, when language is produced in a visual context, speakers make use of both visual and linguistic cues to plan utterances.
Highlights
An important issue in speech production concerns how speakers generate preverbal messages (Huettig et al, 2011)
The findings showed that speech onset latencies were shorter when the visual grouping of objects was congruent with their phrasal organization in utterances
Our findings are in line with the compatibility between visual context and the required linguistic form reported by Bock et al (2003) but show that this effect generalizes to include the visual grouping of objects based on color
Summary
An important issue in speech production concerns how speakers generate preverbal messages (Huettig et al, 2011). In tasks where language is produced in a visual context, such as giving directions from a map, visual and linguistic information are thought to be synchronized and to draw upon cross-modal cognitive mechanisms that allow different modalities to share, exchange, and integrate information (Coco and Keller, 2015). To shed light on this issue, the present study assessed on the interplay between visual information and utterance planning during language production. A promising line of inquiry comes from research that has adapted the visual world paradigm to study language production and shows a strong link between the direction of gaze and speech
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