Incrementality in naming and reading complex numerals: evidence from eyetracking

Abstract

Individuals speak incrementally when they interleave planning and articulation. Eyetracking, along with the measurement of speech onset latencies, can be used to gain more insight into the degree of incrementality adopted by speakers. In the current article, two eyetracking experiments are reported in which pairs of complex numerals were named (arabic format, Experiment 1) or read aloud (alphabetic format, Experiment 2) as house numbers and as clock times. We examined whether the degree of incrementality is differentially influenced by the production task (naming vs. reading) and mode (house numbers vs. clock time expressions), by comparing gaze durations and speech onset latencies. In both tasks and modes, dissociations were obtained between speech onset latencies (reflecting articulation) and gaze durations (reflecting planning), indicating incrementality. Furthermore, whereas none of the factors that determined gaze durations were reflected in the reading and naming latencies for the house numbers, the dissociation between gaze durations and response latencies for the clock times concerned mainly numeral length in both tasks. These results suggest that the degree of incrementality is influenced by the type of utterance (house number vs. clock time) rather than by task (reading vs. naming). The results highlight the importance of the utterance structure in determining the degree of incrementality.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Baayen

Piepenbrock

Gulikers

(1995). The CELEX Lexical Database [CD-ROM] Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, Linguistic Data Consortium.

Barrouillet

Camos

Perruchet

Seron

(2004). ADAPT: A developmental, asemantic, and procedural model for transcoding from verbal to arabic numerals. Psychological Review 111, 368–394.

Bock

Irwin

Davidson

Levelt

WJM

(2003). Minding the clock. Journal of Memory and Language 48, 653–685.

Brysbaert

(1995). Arabic number reading: On the nature of the numerical scale and the origin of phonological recoding. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 124, 434–452.

Clark

(1973). The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12, 335–359.

Ferreira

Swets

(2002). How incremental is language production? Evidence from the production of utterances requiring the computation of arithmetic sums. Journal of Memory and Language 46, 57–84.

Gielen

Brysbaert

Dhondt

(1991). The syllable-length effect in number processing is task-dependent. Perception & Psychophysics 50, 449–458.

Griffin

(2001). Gaze durations during speech reflect word selection and phonological encoding. Cognition 82, B1–B14.

Griffin

Bock

(2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychological Science 11, 274–279.

10.

Inhoff

Radach

Heller

(2000). Complex compounds in German: Interword spaces facilitate segmentation but hinder assignment of meaning. Journal of Memory and Language 42, 23–50.

11.

Levelt

WJM

Meyer

(2000). Word for word: Multiple lexical access in speech production. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 12, 433–452.

12.

Lorch

Jr Myers

(1990). Regression analyses of repeated measures data in cognition research. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16, 149–157.

13.

Meeuwissen

Roelofs

Levelt

WJM

(2003). Planning levels in naming and reading complex numerals. Memory & Cognition 31, 1238–1248.

14.

Meeuwissen

Roelofs

Levelt

WJM

(2004). Naming analog clocks conceptually facilitates naming digital clocks. Brain and Language 90, 434–440.

15.

Meeuwissen

Roelofs

Levelt

WJM

(2005). Levels of speech planning in clock time production, Manuscript submitted for publication.

16.

Meyer

Lethaus

(2004). The use of eyetracking in studies of sentence generation. In J. M. Henderson & F. Ferreira (Eds.) The interface of language, vision, and action: Eye movements and the visual world New York: Psychology Press.

17.

Meyer

Roelofs

Levelt

WJM

(2003). Word length effects in object naming: The role of a response criterion. Journal of Memory and Language 48, 131–147.

18.

Meyer

Sleiderink

Levelt

WJM

(1998). Viewing and naming objects: Eye movements during noun phrase production. Cognition, B25–B33 66.

19.

Meyer

Van der Meulen

(2000). Phonological priming of picture viewing and picture naming. Psychological Bulletin & Review 7, 314–319.

20.

Pinheiro

Bates

(2000). Mixed-effects models in S and S-PLUS (statistics and computing). New York: Springer.

21.

Pynte

(1974). Readiness for pronunciation during the reading process. Perception & Psychophysics 16, 110–112.

22.

Raaijmakers

JGW

Schrijnemakers

JMC

Gremmen

(1999). How to deal with “The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy”: Common misconceptions and alternative solutions. Journal of Memory and Language 41, 416–426.