Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Eye-movements to pictures of four objects on a screen were monitored as participants heard progressively larger gates and tried to identify the object (Experiment 1) or followed a spoken instruction to move one of the objects (Experiment 2), e.g., "Pick up the beaker; now put it below the diamond". The distractor objects included a cohort competitor with a name that shared the initial onset and vowel as the target object (e.g., beetle), a rhyme competitor (e.g. speaker) and an unrelated competitor (e.g. carriage). In the gating task, which emphasizes word initial information, there was clear evidence for multiple activation of cohort members, as measured by judgments and eye-movements. With continuous speech there was clear evidence for both cohort and rhyme activation as predicted by continuous activation models such as TRACE (Elman and McClelland, 1988). Moreover, the time course and probabilities of eye-movements closely corresponded to simulations generated from TRACE.