Language-mediated visual orienting behavior in low and high literates

Abstract

The influence of formal literacy on spoken language-mediated visual orienting was inves-tigated by using a simple look and listen task which resembles every day behavior. In Experiment 1, high and low literates listened to spoken sentences containing a target word (e.g., "magar," crocodile) while at the same time looking at a visual display of four objects (a phonological competitor of the target word, e.g., "matar," peas; a semantic competitor, e.g., "kachuwa," turtle, and two unrelated distractors). In Experiment 2 the semantic com-petitor was replaced with another unrelated distractor. Both groups of participants shifted their eye gaze to the semantic competitors (Experiment 1). In both experiments high lit-erates shifted their eye gaze toward phonological competitors as soon as phonological information became available and moved their eyes away as soon as the acoustic infor-mation mismatched. Low literates in contrast only used phonological information when semantic matches between spoken word and visual referent were not present (Experi-ment 2) but in contrast to high literates these phonologically mediated shifts in eye gaze were not closely time-locked to the speech input.These data provide further evidence that in high literates language-mediated shifts in overt attention are co-determined by the type of information in the visual environment, the timing of cascaded processing in the word-and object-recognition systems, and the temporal unfolding of the spoken language. Our findings indicate that low literates exhibit a similar cognitive behavior but instead of par-ticipating in a tug-of-war among multiple types of cognitive representations, word-object mapping is achieved primarily at the semantic level. If forced, for instance by a situation in which semantic matches are not present (Experiment 2), low literates may on occasion have to rely on phonological information but do so in a much less proficient manner than their highly literate counterparts. © 2011 Huettig, Singh and Mishra.