Coordination of vision and language in cross-modal referential processing
This thesis investigates the mechanisms underlying the formation, maintenance, and sharing of reference in tasks in which language and vision interact. Previous research in psycholinguistics and visual cognition has provided insights into the formation of reference in cross-modal tasks. The conclusions reached are largely independent, with the focus on mechanisms pertaining to either linguistic or visual processing. In this thesis, we present a series of eye-tracking experiments that aim to unify these distinct strands of research by identifying and quantifying factors that underlie the cross-modal interaction between scene understanding and sentence processing. Our results show that both low-level (imagebased) and high-level (object-based) visual information interacts actively with linguistic information during situated language processing tasks. In particular, during language understanding (Chapter 3), image-based information, i.e., saliency, is used to predict the upcoming arguments of the sentence, when the linguistic material alone is not sufficient to make such predictions. During language production (Chapter 4), visual attention has the active role of sourcing referential information for sentence encoding.
Coco, Moreno Ignazio
eye-tracking ; coordination ; scene understanding
Coordination of vision and language in cross-modal referential processing. This thesis investigates the mechanisms underlying the formation, maintenance, and sharing of reference in tasks in which language and vision interact. Previous research in psycholinguistics and visual cognition has provided insights into the formation of reference in cross-modal tasks. The conclusions reached are largely independent, with the focus on mechanisms pertaining to either linguistic or visual processing. In this thesis, we present a series of eye-tracking experiments that aim to unify these distinct strands of research by identifying and quantifying factors that underlie the cross-modal interaction between scene understanding and sentence processing. Our results show that both low-level (imagebased) and high-level (object-based) visual information interacts actively with linguistic information during situated language processing tasks. In particular, during language understanding (Chapter 3), image-based information, i.e., saliency, is used to predict the upcoming arguments of the sentence, when the linguistic material alone is not sufficient to make such predictions. During language production (Chapter 4), visual attention has the active role of sourcing referential information for sentence encoding.
coordination vision language cross_modal referential processing investigates mechanisms underlie formation_maintenance share reference task language vision interact previous psycholinguistics visual cognition provide_insight formation reference cross_modal task conclusion_reach largely independent focus mechanism pertain either linguistic visual processing present_series eye_tracking aim unify distinct strand identify quantify factor underlie cross_modal interaction scene sentence_processing show low_level high_level object based visual information actively linguistic information situate language_processing task particular language image based information use_predict argument sentence linguistic material alone sufficient make prediction language_production visual attention active_role source referential information sentence encoding