Interaction of language and visual attention: evidence from production and comprehension

Abstract

Recent developments in multimodal interactions in language processing have revealed important facts about the important controlling influence of the attentional system on language behavior. In this chapter, we cover the attentional system that is important for language processing and its interaction with the microstructure of the linguistic system. We argue that to understand the origin of language-mediated eye movements; we must integrate neuronal mechanisms of saccade generation with language processing. We discuss the various facets of interaction of language processing with visual attentional mechanism using eye-tracking data from Hindi in the production and comprehension of language. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.