General description
Over the last decades, eye-tracking has become a widespread technique to understand how people process and learn language. In this course, we will cover a basic introduction to eye-tracking techniques in language sciences. More concretely, the following aspects of eye-tracking will be discussed:
- How do eye-trackers work and what has their scientific impact been on our understanding of language processing? Specifically, we will discuss why we do eye-tracking, what kinds of data we can obtain, and what the basics of any experiment that involves eye-tracking are. This will set the grounds to discuss what paradigms we have at our disposal to explore language processing.
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What paradigms are available to explore speech comprehension and written language comprehension? We will devote two days to discussing the Visual World Paradigm and eye-tracking-while-reading paradigms. In these two days, we will focus on the specifics of each paradigm, including confounds, the kinds of questions we can explore, and the measures of interest.
- How to set up and conduct an eye-tracking study, and what kind of data does an eye-tracking experiment give? In this part, we will discuss how to work with the eye-tracker to gather high-quality data. This will include an overview of the different problems that may arise when testing participants and how to prevent or solve them. From there, we will discuss data processing and analysis. Note, however, that this is not a course on data analysis. The aim is to give an idea of the output of an eye-tracking experiment.
Throughout this course, students will be encouraged to think of research questions of their interest that can make use of the eye-tracking technique. This course will assume zero background in experimental design and programming, so the basics will be briefly covered at the beginning of the course. Importantly, students will be given hands-on sessions on how to program an eye-tracking study. This will include a lab visit, where we will cover the practicalities of an eye-tracking experiment as well as allow students to run their own experiment on their classmates.
Target audience
Researchers who have no or little knowledge about eye-tracking and are eager to learn more about eye-tracking technique to study language or want to work with eye-tracking in the future.
Course prerequisites
None
Course materials
The course slides will be made available. We will also discuss several papers and handbook chapters. Links to these resources will be made available.
Teacher bio
Mariia Baltais holds a master’s degree in Experimental and Clinical Linguistics from Potsdam University; currently she is working towards her PhD in Psychology at Ghent University. Her research focuses on the phenomenon of syntactic productivity, that is, potential lexical openness of syntactic structures. By means of eye-tracking, she investigates how productivity together with frequency and semantics influence speakers’ eye movements during reading.
Esperanza Badaya is a post-doctoral research assistant at the Department of Experimental Psychology of Ghent University, where she assists researchers using the eye-tracking technique (including experimental design and programming to statistical analysis) and teaches courses and modules on eye-tracking, while conducting research on psycholinguistics. Esperanza obtained her PhD in Psychology and an MSc in Psychology of Language at the University of Edinburgh, where she also taught courses on statistics and programming. Her research focuses on how we process spontaneous speech, which is riddled with hesitations and errors, and how interlocutors’ identities inform language processing. Specifically, she uses eye-tracking techniques such as the Visual World Paradigm to investigate whether and how mono- and bilinguals process and interpret speech with filled pauses produced by first- and second-language speakers.
Schedule
- Monday 15/07/2024, 9:00-10:30 & 11:00-12:30
- Tuesday 16/07/2024, 9:00-10:30 & 11:00-12:30
- Wednesday 17/07/2024, 9:00-10:30 & 11:00-12:30
- Thursday 18/07/2024, 9:00-10:30 & 11:00-12:30
- Friday 19/07/2024, 9:00-10:30 & 11:00-12:30
In addition to these contact hours this module expects about five hours in total for self-study.