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What eye movements can tell us about sentence comprehension
Author(s) -
Vasishth Shravan,
von der Malsburg Titus,
Engelmann Felix
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
wiley interdisciplinary reviews: cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.526
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1939-5086
pISSN - 1939-5078
DOI - 10.1002/wcs.1209
Subject(s) - eye movement , parsing , computer science , sentence , comprehension , artificial intelligence , anticipation (artificial intelligence) , relevance (law) , eye tracking , sentence processing , natural language processing , movement (music) , interpretation (philosophy) , control (management) , cognitive psychology , psychology , philosophy , political science , law , programming language , aesthetics
Eye movement data have proven to be very useful for investigating human sentence processing. Eyetracking research has addressed a wide range of questions, such as recovery mechanisms following garden‐pathing, the timing of processes driving comprehension, the role of anticipation and expectation in parsing, the role of semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic information, and so on. However, there are some limitations regarding the inferences that can be made on the basis of eye movements. One relates to the nontrivial interaction between parsing and the eye movement control system which complicates the interpretation of eye movement data. Detailed computational models that integrate parsing with eye movement control theories have the potential to unpack the complexity of eye movement data and can therefore aid in the interpretation of eye movements. Another limitation is the difficulty of capturing spatiotemporal patterns in eye movements using the traditional word‐based eyetracking measures. Recent research has demonstrated the relevance of these patterns and has shown how they can be analyzed. In this review, we focus on reading, and present examples demonstrating how eye movement data reveal what events unfold when the parser runs into difficulty, and how the parsing system interacts with eye movement control. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:125–134. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1209 This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Computational Models of Language

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