Children flexibly seek visual information to support signed and spoken language comprehension

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Grounded language comprehension requires linking language to the visual world.
• Visual fixations can aid understanding, but flexible information seeking is debated.
• Listeners must manage attention between linguistic input and visual referents.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if young children adapt gaze to actively gather visual information for language comprehension.
• To examine how context influences the strategic use of visual attention during language processing.
• To determine if gaze adaptation supports understanding in both spoken and signed languages.

Main Methods:

• Eye-tracking studies were conducted during real-time language processing.
• Experiment 1 compared American Sign Language (ASL) learners with English speakers.
• Experiment 2 examined English-speaking preschoolers and adults in noisy auditory conditions.

Main Results:

• ASL learners delayed gaze shifts from the language source, increasing language-consistent eye movements.
• English speakers in noisy environments fixated longer on the speaker's face.
• Both groups gathered more visual information and showed more language-consistent gaze shifts through gaze adaptation.

Conclusions:

• Young children and adults can flexibly adapt their gaze to seek visual information.
• Gaze adaptation supports real-time language comprehension by optimizing visual attention.
• This active information-seeking strategy is crucial for understanding in visually demanding contexts.