Speech monitoring and phonologically-mediated eye gaze in language perception and production: a comparison using printed word eye-tracking

Abstract

The Perceptual Loop Theory of speech monitoring assumes that speakers routinely inspect their inner speech. In contrast, Huettig and Hartsuiker (2010) observed that listening to one's own speech during language production drives eye-movements to phonologically related printed words with a similar time-course as listening to someone else's speech does in speech perception experiments. This suggests that speakers use their speech perception system to listen to their own overt speech, but not to their inner speech. However, a direct comparison between production and perception with the same stimuli and participants is lacking so far. The current printed word eye-tracking experiment therefore used a within-subjects design, combining production and perception. Displays showed four words, of which one, the target, either had to be named or was presented auditorily. Accompanying words were phonologically related, semantically related, or unrelated to the target. There were small increases in looks to phonological competitors with a similar time-course in both production and perception. Phonological effects in perception however lasted longer and had a much larger magnitude. We conjecture that this difference is related to a difference in predictability of one's own and someone else's speech, which in turn has consequences for lexical competition in other-perception and possibly suppression of activation in self-perception.

Keywords: language production; perceptual loop theory; speech perception; speech prediction; verbal self-monitoring.

Figure 1

Examples of the display in the production condition (A) and the perception condition (B).

Figure 2

Eye-movements in the phonological trials of the perception condition. Proportion of fixations are sorted per quadrant and plotted as a function of time. Time point −200 is the onset of the display. Speech onset of the target word is at 0 ms, as indicated by the black line.

Figure 3

Eye-movements in the phonological trials of the production condition. Proportion of fixations are sorted per quadrant and plotted as a function of time. Time point 0 is the speech onset, as indicated by the black line.