Developmental changes in allocation of visual attention during sentence generation: An eye tracking study

Abstract

To Look and speak requires a dynamic synchronization of both visual attention and linguistic processing. This study explored patterns of visual attention in a group of Hindi speaking children and adults, as they generated sentences to real photographs. Photographs contained either a single human agent performing an intransitive action, an agent performing an action with an object or two actors involved in a mutual action in the presence of an object. The eye movements were recorded as participants generated sentences for each photograph, and several dependent measures were calculated. Eye movements to subject and verb regions in each picture revealed striking differences between children and adults as far as deployment of visual attention was concerned. Adults deployed significantly higher amount of attention to the verb region during the conceptualization process and throughout viewing compared to children. Children had higher number of fixations and saccades to different regions but did not attend to the regions in a stable manner over time. The results suggest that in a verb final language like Hindi, generating sentence requires first allocation of attention to the region denoting action, and children and adults differ from each other in this process.