ABSTRACT
Eye tracking is the real-time registration of an individual’s eye movements, typically as he or she views information on a computer screen. This chapter introduces eye tracking along with three other concurrent methodologies—think-aloud protocols, self-paced reading (SPR) and event-related potentials (ERPs)—which present themselves as complements and sometimes competitors to the eye-tracking method. Of all online methodologies, SPR—the self-paced reading of sentences that are broken down and presented in separate segments—is the one that resembles eye tracking most closely. Participants in a SPR experiment read sentences or short paragraphs in a word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase fashion. D. C. Mitchell noted that SPR and eye tracking have provided converging evidence about native language (L1) sentence processing, whereby the SPR studies often precede comparable eye-tracking research by a few years. The ERP data revealed that L1 French speakers showed P600 effects regardless of where the adjective occurred in the sentence.
