Tracking Time from Visual Perception to Articulation

University Of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign IL

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): People talk about what they see. The proposed project examines what happens, perceptually and linguistically, when visual experience in a familiar domain is transformed into language. The goal is to contrast alternative accounts of how nonverbal messages become connected speech and to evaluate the role that language differences play in shaping how information is extracted from the perceptual world. The perceptual experience in question comes from clock faces displaying times in analog and digital formats. The language comes from the standard expressions for telling time in two languages, English and Dutch. Scientific understanding of how people convey ideas linguistically is limited first by the difficulty of gaining access to whatever it is that constitutes an idea, and second by the diversity of expression that characterizes normal communication. The telling of time simplifies both of these problems. It offers the advantage of a precise definition of what is to be conveyed linguistically (the "idea" is the mental representation of the time) and a repertoire of time-telling expressions that are known to almost all adults. The perceptual displays that give rise to synonymous "time ideas" can differ dramatically (e.g., between analog and digital displays) and the repertoire of time expressions, though limited, offers options within English (e.g., one-twenty; twenty after one) and Dutch (where the analogous expressions, literally translated, are one hour twenty or ten before half two). This provides a means for exploring and explaining how ideas become phrases, and examining how the process changes when perceptions, expressions, and languages change. The experiments measure the timing of eye-movements to the elements of clock displays relative to the production of components of time-telling expressions, as speakers produce time expressions of different kinds (e.g., one-twenty, twenty past one). These measurements reveal the relationships among alternative means of displaying time, alternative means of telling time, and the consequences for perception and speaking. The aim is to develop a small, tractable approach to a large, intractable problem. The problem concerns the normal ability to convey thought in language and the normal influence of language on how we perceive and conceive the world.