Attention and Vision in Language Processing

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the nature of attentional and visual processes involved in language comprehension. Key concerns include how linguistic and non-linguistic processes jointly determine language comprehension and production, and how the linguistic system interfaces with perceptual systems and attention. Language scientists have traditionally considered language in isolation from other cognitive and perceptual systems such as attention, vision, and memory. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly clear that language comprehension must be studied within interaction contexts. The study of multimodal interactions and attentional processes during language processing has thus become an important theoretical focus that guides many research programs in psycholinguistics and related fields.§§The contributors to this volume are highly distinguished scholars who come from leading labs in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Asia. The chapters describe central research topics, discuss and evaluate the major theories, and present new empirical findings on specific research issues, e.g., on whether bilinguals use visual cues to select the right language for a particular context, and how they do this; the mechanisms of everyday language-vision interactions; nature of recognition of printed words when viewed in isolation and in connected texts; response time of covert visual attention after hearing a sound, etc. The book provides answers to these and other timely research questions, and raises many thought-provoking new ones.§