Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

and second, that (in some versions) it is subject to various strategies of the participants
(e.g. a participant in an experiment could press the buttons quickly and than read all the
words of a sentence in peace).
In Croatia a version of reading time measure was widely used in elementary schools in
the sixties and seventies to test children’s ability to read. The quantity of the text read per
minute was measured (Furlan, 1973) to detect children with reading problems. However,
the reading time measure was not in the sense described above, i.e. to test the difference
between experimental conditions.
Eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is immune to the above criticism in sentence comprehension
studies. The technique employs a camera that is focused on an eye and records its
motions. The reconstruction of the eye movement is based on the system’s ability to
reconstruct the centre of the pupil. The eye-tracking method makes use of the fact that the
eye ‘moves’ in saccades, i.e. in brief movements from one to another point of fixation.
Only during the fixation periods the information from the eye is available. Recording
these points of fixation reveals what information is processed, in what order and for how
long. In sentence comprehension studies that use this technique two assumptions are
made (Pickering et al., 2004): immediacy assumption; that the information is processed
as soon as it is encountered; and eye-mind assumption; that it is the word that is looked at
that is processed.
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