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23 - Eye-Tracking and Self-Paced Reading

from Part IV - Experimental Syntax beyond Acceptability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Claudia Felser
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

This chapter focuses on experimental psycholinguistic techniques that tap into real-time sentence processing by measuring moment-by-moment reading times or eye-gaze patterns. Data recorded during real-time reading or listening can provide implicit measures of grammatical sensitivity and are a valuable source of evidence for grammatical distinctions, operations, and constraints proposed within the theoretical linguistic literature. A selective review of recent reading-time and eye-movement monitoring studies illustrates how these techniques can help us investigate theoretical linguistic issues and hypotheses, and provide insights into the nature of syntactic derivations and representations. Charting comprehenders' sentence processing profiles over time can help reveal the sources of unacceptability and of grammatical illusions, the point in time at which grammatical violations are detected, the point in time at which grammatical constraints are applied, and can also reveal processing reflexes of a sentence's derivational history.

Keywords

sentence processingeye-movement monitoringvisual-world paradigmself-paced readingmovement phenomenabindingagreement attractioncase attractionisland constraints
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 617 - 640
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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