What the eyes say about speaking

To study the time course of sentence formulation, we monitored the eve move ments of speakers as they described simple events. The similarity between s peakers' initial eye movements and those of observers performing a nonverba l event-comprehension task suggested that response-relevant information was rapidly extracted from scenes, allowing speakers to select grammatical sub jects based on comprehended events rather than salience. When speaking exte mporaneously, speakers began fixating pictured elements less than a second before naming them within their descriptions, a finding consistent with inc remental lexical encoding. Eye movements anticipated the order of mention d espite changes in picture orientation, in who-did-what-to-whom, and in sent ence structure. The results support Wundt's theory of sentence production.