A common critique of the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) in psycholinguistic studies is that what is designed as a measure of language processes is meaningfully altered by the visual context of the task. This is crucial, particularly in studies of spoken word recognition, where the displayed images are usually seen as just a part of the measure and are not of fundamental interest. Many variants of the VWP allow participants to sample the visual scene before a trial begins. However, this could bias their interpretations of the later speech or even lead to abnormal processing strategies (e.g., comparing the input to only preactivated working memory representations). Prior work has focused only on whether preview duration changes fixation patterns. However, preview could affect a number of processes, such as visual search, that would not challenge the interpretation of the VWP. The present study uses a series of targeted manipulations of the preview period to ask if preview alters looking behavior during a trial, and why. Results show that evidence of incremental processing and phonological competition seen in the VWP are not dependent on preview, and are not enhanced by manipulations that directly encourage phonological prenaming. Moreover, some forms of preview can eliminate nuisance variance deriving from object recognition and visual search demands in order to produce a more sensitive measure of linguistic processing. These results deepen our understanding of how the visual scene interacts with language processing to drive fixations patterns in the VWP, and reinforce the value of the VWP as a tool for measuring real-time language processing. Stimuli, data and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/b7q65/.

心理语言学研究中对视觉世界范式 (VWP) 的一个普遍批评是，设计为衡量语言过程的内容会因任务的视觉环境而发生有意义的改变。这是至关重要的，尤其是在口语识别研究中，其中显示的图像通常被视为衡量标准的一部分，而不是根本利益。VWP 的许多变体允许参与者在试验开始前对视觉场景进行采样。然而，这可能会使他们对后来的语音的解释产生偏差，甚至导致异常的处理策略（例如，将输入与仅预激活的工作记忆表示进行比较）。之前的工作只关注预览持续时间是否会改变注视模式。但是，预览可能会影响许多过程，例如视觉搜索、这不会挑战 VWP 的解释。本研究使用一系列对预览期的有针对性的操作来询问预览是否会改变试验期间的观看行为，以及为什么。结果表明，在 VWP 中看到的增量处理和语音竞争的证据不依赖于预览，并且不会通过直接鼓励语音预命名的操作来增强。此外，某些形式的预览可以消除源自对象识别和视觉搜索需求的滋扰方差，从而产生更灵敏的语言处理测量。这些结果加深了我们对视觉场景如何与语言处理相互作用以驱动 VWP 中的注视模式的理解，并强化了 VWP 作为衡量实时语言处理工具的价值。刺激，