Falk Huettig

Presentations

Displaying 1 - 33 of 33
  • Favier, S., Meyer, A. S., & Huettig, F. (2018). Does literacy predict individual differences in the syntactic processing of spoken language?. Poster presented at the 1st Workshop on Cognitive Science of Culture, Lisbon, Portugal.
  • Favier, S., Meyer, A. S., & Huettig, F. (2018). Does reading ability predict individual differences in spoken language syntactic processing?. Poster presented at the International Meeting of the Psychonomics Society 2018, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
  • Favier, S., Meyer, A. S., & Huettig, F. (2018). How does literacy influence syntactic processing in spoken language?. Talk presented at Psycholinguistics in Flanders (PiF 2018). Gent, Belgium. 2018-06-04 - 2018-06-05.
  • Garrido Rodriguez, G., Huettig, F., Norcliffe, E., Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2018). Participant assignment to thematic roles in Tzeltal: Eye tracking evidence from sentence comprehension in a verb-initial language. Talk presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP 2018). Berlin, Germany. 2018-09-06 - 2018-09-08.
  • Huettig, F. (2018). How learning to read changes mind and brain [keynote]. Talk presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing-Asia (AMLaP-Asia 2018). Telangana, India. 2018-02-01 - 2018-02-03.
  • Ostarek, M., Van Paridon, J., Hagoort, P., & Huettig, F. (2018). Multi-voxel pattern analysis reveals conceptual flexibility and invariance in language. Poster presented at the 10th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL 2018), Québec City, Canada.
  • Garrido Rodriguez, G., Huettig, F., Norcliffe, E., Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2017). Participant assignment to thematic roles in Tzeltal: Eye tracking evidence from sentence comprehension in a verb-initial language. Poster presented at the workshop 'Event Representations in Brain, Language & Development' (EvRep), Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
  • Ostarek, M., Van Paridon, J., & Huettig, F. (2017). Conceptual processing of up/down words (cloud/grass) recruits cortical oculomotor areas central for planning and executing saccadic eye movements. Talk presented at the 10th Embodied and Situated Language Processing Conference. Moscow, Russia. 2017-09-10 - 2017-09-12.
  • Ostarek, M., & Huettig, F. (2017). Grounding language in vision [Invited talk]. Talk presented at the University of California Davis. Davis, CA, USA.
  • Ostarek, M., Van Paridon, J., Evans, S., & Huettig, F. (2017). Processing of up/down words recruits the cortical oculomotor network. Poster presented at the 24th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA, USA.
  • Huettig, F. (2013). Anticipatory eye movements and predictive language processing. Talk presented at the ZiF research group on "Competition and Priority Control in Mind and Brain. Bielefeld, Germany. 2013-07.
  • Huettig, F., Mani, N., Mishra, R. K., & Brouwer, S. (2013). Literacy as a proxy for experience: Reading ability predicts anticipatory language processing in children, low literate adults, and adults with dyslexia. Poster presented at The 19th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP 2013), Marseille, France.
  • Huettig, F., Mishra, R. K., Kumar, U., Singh, J. P., Guleria, A., & Tripathi, V. (2013). Phonemic and syllabic awareness of adult literates and illiterates in an Indian alphasyllabic language. Talk presented at the Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen [TeaP 2013]. Vienna, Austria. 2013-03-24 - 2013-03-27.
  • Huettig, F., Mani, N., Mishra, R. K., & Brouwer, S. (2013). Reading ability predicts anticipatory language processing in children, low literate adults, and adults with dyslexia. Talk presented at the 11th International Symposium of Psycholinguistics. Tenerife, Spain. 2013-03-20 - 2013-03-23.
  • Huettig, F., Mani, N., Mishra, R. K., & Brouwer, S. (2013). Reading ability predicts anticipatory language processing in children, low literate adults, and adults with dyslexia. Talk presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Toronto, Canada. 2013-11-14 - 2013-11-17.
  • Janse, E., Huettig, F., & Jesse, A. (2013). Working memory modulates the immediate use of context for recognizing words in sentences. Talk presented at the 5th Workshop on Speech in Noise: Intelligibility and Quality. Vitoria, Spain. 2013-01-10 - 2013-01-11.
  • Lai, V. T., & Huettig, F. (2013). When anticipation meets emotion: EEG evidence for distinct processing mechanisms. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, San Diego, US.
  • Lai, V. T., & Huettig, F. (2013). When anticipation meets emotion: EEG evidence for distinct processing mechanisms. Poster presented at The 19th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP 2013), Marseille, France.
  • Mani, N., & Huettig, F. (2013). Reading ability predicts anticipatory language processing in 8 year olds. Talk presented at the Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen [TeaP 2013]. Vienna, Austria. 2013-03-24 - 2013-03-27.
  • Rommers, J., Meyer, A. S., Piai, V., & Huettig, F. (2013). Constraining the involvement of language production in comprehension: A comparison of object naming and object viewing in sentence context. Talk presented at the 19th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2013]. Marseille, France. 2013-09-02 - 2013-09-04.
  • Rommers, J., Meyer, A. S., Praamstra, P., & Huettig, F. (2013). Anticipating references to objects during sentence comprehension. Talk presented at the Experimental Psychology Society meeting (EPS). Bangor, UK. 2013-07-03 - 2013-07-05.
  • Smith, A. C., Monaghan, P., & Huettig, F. (2013). Both phonological grain-size and general processing speed determine literacy related differences in language mediated eye gaze: Evidence from a connectionist model. Poster presented at The 18th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology [ESCOP 2013], Budapest, Hungary.
  • Smith, A. C., Monaghan, P., & Huettig, F. (2013). Modelling the effect of literacy on multimodal interactions during spoken language processing in the visual world. Talk presented at Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen. [TEAP 2013]. Vienna, Austria. 2013-03-24 - 2013-03-27.

    Abstract

    Recent empirical evidence suggests that language-mediated eye gaze around the visual world varies across individuals and is partly determined by their level of formal literacy training. Huettig, Singh & Mishra (2011) showed that unlike high-literate individuals, whose eye gaze was closely time locked to phonological overlap between a spoken target word and items presented in a visual display, low-literate individuals eye gaze was not tightly locked to phonological overlap in the speech signal but instead strongly influenced by semantic relationships between items. Our present study tests the hypothesis that this behaviour is an emergent property of an increased ability to extract phonological structure from the speech signal, as in the case of high-literates, with low-literates more reliant on syllabic structure. This hypothesis was tested using an emergent connectionist model, based on the Hub-and-spoke models of semantic processing (Dilkina et al, 2008), that integrates linguistic information extracted from the speech signal with visual and semantic information within a central resource. We demonstrate that contrasts in fixation behaviour similar to those observed between high and low literates emerge when the model is trained on either a speech signal segmented by phoneme (i.e. high-literates) or by syllable (i.e. low-literates).
  • Smith, A. C., Monaghan, P., & Huettig, F. (2013). Phonological grain size and general processing speed modulates language mediated visual attention – Evidence from a connectionist model. Talk presented at The 19th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2013]. Marseille, France. 2013-09-02 - 2013-09-04.
  • Smith, A. C., Monaghan, P., & Huettig, F. (2013). Putting rhyme in context: Visual and semantic competition eliminates phonological rhyme effects in language-mediated eye gaze. Talk presented at The 18th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology [ESCOP 2013]. Budapest, Hungary. 2013-08-29 - 2013-09-01.
  • Smith, A. C., Monaghan, P., & Huettig, F. (2013). Semantic and visual competition eliminates the influence of rhyme overlap in spoken language processing. Poster presented at The 19th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2013], Marseille, France.
  • Huettig, F., & Gastel, A. (2010). Language-mediated eye movements and attentional control: Phonological and semantic competition effects are contigent upon scene complexity. Poster presented at the 16th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2010], York, UK.
  • Huettig, F., Singh, N., & Mishra, R. (2010). Language-mediated prediction is contingent upon formal literacy. Talk presented at Brain, Speech and Orthography Workshop. Brussels, Belgium. 2010-10-15 - 2010-10-16.

    Abstract

    A wealth of research has demonstrated that prediction is a core feature of human information processing. Much less is known, however, about the nature and the extent of predictive processing abilities. Here we investigated whether high levels of language expertise attained through formal literacy are related to anticipatory language-mediated visual orienting. Indian low and high literates listened to simple spoken sentences containing a target word (e.g., "door") while at the same time looking at a visual display of four objects (a target, i.e. the door, and three distractors). The spoken sentences were constructed to encourage anticipatory eye movements to visual target objects. High literates started to shift their eye gaze to the target object well before target word onset. In the low literacy group this shift of eye gaze occurred more than a second later, well after the onset of the target. Our findings suggest that formal literacy is crucial for the fine-tuning of language-mediated anticipatory mechanisms, abilities which proficient language users can then exploit for other cognitive activities such as language-mediated visual orienting.
  • Huettig, F. (2010). Looking, language, and memory. Talk presented at Language, Cognition, and Emotion Workshop. Delhi, India. 2010-12-06 - 2010-12-06.
  • Huettig, F. (2010). Toddlers’ language-mediated visual search: They need not have the words for it. Talk presented at International Conference on Cognitive Development 2010. Allahabad, India. 2010-12-10 - 2010-12-13.

    Abstract

    Eye movements made by listeners during language-mediated visual search reveal a strong link between visual processing and conceptual processing. For example, upon hearing the word for a missing referent with a characteristic colour (e.g., “strawberry”), listeners tend to fixate a colour-matched distractor (e.g., a red plane) more than a colour-mismatched distractor (e.g., a yellow plane). We ask whether these shifts in visual attention are mediated by the retrieval of lexically stored colour labels. Do children who do not yet possess verbal labels for the colour attribute that spoken and viewed objects have in common exhibit language-mediated eye movements like those made by older children and adults? That is, do toddlers look at a red plane when hearing “strawberry”? We observed that 24-month-olds lacking colour-term knowledge nonetheless recognised the perceptual-conceptual commonality between named and seen objects. This indicates that language-mediated visual search need not depend on stored labels for concepts.
  • Rommers, J., Huettig, F., & Meyer, A. S. (2010). Task-dependency in the activation of visual representations during language comprehension. Poster presented at The Embodied Mind: Perspectives and Limitations, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
  • Rommers, J., Huettig, F., & Meyer, A. S. (2010). Task-dependent activation of visual representations during language comprehension. Poster presented at The 16th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2010], York, UK.
  • Huettig, F., Chen, J., Bowerman, M., & Majid, A. (2008). Linguistic relativity: Evidence from Mandarin speakers’ eye-movements. Talk presented at 14th Annual Conference on the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2008]. Cambridge, UK. 2008-09-04 - 2008-09-06.

    Abstract

    If a Mandarin speaker had walked past two rivers and wished to describe how many he had seen, he would have to say “two tiao river”, where tiao designates long, rope-like objects such as rivers, snakes and legs. Tiao is one of several hundred classifiers – a grammatical category in Mandarin. In two eye-tracking studies we presented Mandarin speakers with simple Mandarin sentences through headphones while monitoring their eye-movements to objects presented on a computer monitor. The crucial question is what participants look at while listening to a pre-specified target noun. If classifier categories influence general conceptual processing then on hearing the target noun participants should look at objects that are also members of the same classifier category – even when the classifier is not explicitly present. For example, on hearing scissors, Mandarin speakers should look more at a picture of a chair than at an unrelated object because scissors and chair share the classifier ba. This would be consistent with a Strong Whorfian position, according to which language is a major determinant in shaping conceptual thought (Sapir, 1921; Whorf, 1956). A weaker influence of language-on-thought could be predicted, where language shapes cognitive processing, but only when the language-specific category is actively being processed (Slobin, 1996). According to this account, eye-movements are not necessarily drawn to chair when a participant hears scissors, but they would be on hearing ba scissors. This is because hearing ba activates the linguistic category that both scissors and chair belong to. A third logical possibility is that classifiers are purely formal markers (cf. Greenberg, 1972; Lehman, 1979) that do not influence attentional processing even when they are explicitly present. The data showed that when participants heard a spoken word from the same classifier category as a visually depicted object (e.g. scissors-chair), but the classifier was not explicitly presented in the speech, overt attention to classifier-match objects (e.g. chair) and distractor objects did not differ (Experiment 1). But when the classifier was explicitly presented (e.g. ba, Experiment 2), participants shifted overt attention significantly more to classifier-match objects (e.g. chair) than to distractors. These data are incompatible with the Strong Whorfian hypothesis. Instead the findings support the Weak Whorfian hypothesis that linguistic distinctions force attention to properties of the world but only during active linguistic processing of that distinction (cf. Slobin, 1996).

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