Visual Attention and Linguistic Preferences in Time-Telling: A Cross-Linguistic Study of German, Czech, and Russian Speakers.

This study investigates how speakers’ initial fixations on analog clock regions (minute vs. hour hand) align with the production of relative and absolute time expressions in German, Czech, and Russian. Building on previous research on linguistic preferences in time‑telling, we tested whether fixation patterns primarily reflect syntactic word order, language‑specific expression preferences, or the interaction of both factors. Eye‑tracking data revealed broadly similar fixation patterns across languages for relative expressions: all groups tended to fixate first on the minute hand, consistent with syntactic structure and incremental planning models of language production by Levelt (Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1989). In contrast, different patterns emerged for absolute expressions. Russian speakers showed a significantly stronger hour-first fixation pattern, consistent with the syntactic structure of absolute time expressions (“hour before minute”). German and Czech participants, however, distributed their initial fixations almost evenly across both areas of interest (minute‑hand and hour‑hand regions), suggesting that their strong habitual preference for relative expressions may attenuate syntactic ordering effects when producing less familiar absolute constructions. We interpret these findings as indicating that visual attention during speech production is shaped not only by syntactic structure (i.e., the structural order of time expressions such as hour-first vs. minute-first) but also by habitual language use. Our results highlight how cognitive processes such as visual attention interact dynamically with language use across cultural contexts.