Verbal or Visual Thinker? Different Ways of Orienting in a Complex Picture

A complex picture was shown to 12 subjects, and each subject was asked to describe it from memory. Their spoken descriptions were recorded, transcribed and segmented into intonation units (Chafe 1994). The transcripts were then qualitatively analyzed with respect to how the picture had been conceptualized. As a result, two different styles of description could be identified. Perceiving space was dominant in the more static technical style, while perceiving time was dominant in the dynamic narrative style. A parallel can be drawn between the technical versus narrative style, and the visual versus verbal thinker (Grow 1996). In study 2 and 3, the relation of visual perception and spoken language description is further skeched.