The Visual World Paradigm in Children with Spoken Language Disorders

Introduction

Eye movements have been one of the most widely used response measures in psycholinguistic studies of reading for more than a century (see Henderson & Ferreira, 2004; Rayner, 1998). In contrast, it is only within the last two decades that eye movements have become a commonly used response measure in studies of spoken language processing (Tanenhaus, 2007). These studies are included in the so-called ‘visual world paradigm’ (Cooper, 1974; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995). In these studies, participants’ eye movements are monitored during scene viewing in language comprehension and production activities. When people are simultaneously presented with spoken language and a visual field containing elements semantically related to the informative items of speech, they tend to spontaneously direct their line of sight to those elements that are most closely related to the meaning of the language currently heard (e.g. fixating on a lion upon hearing part or all of the word ‘lion’). On the other hand, in language production, when speakers describe actions or events based on a visual image, they focus their visual attention on each element before producing specific language about it (e.g. fixating on a zebra upon say the sentence ‘The zebra runs away’ while watching a scene of the African savannah).