ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on eye-tracking studies conducted with spoken language, using the visual world paradigm, a paradigm for studying spoken language comprehension. The visual world paradigm presents researchers with a set of strengths that complement eye tracking with text. A method for studying spoken language processing, the visual world paradigm is founded on a linking hypothesis that maps auditory-linguistic processing onto visual processing. Visual world researchers use eye movements as a representational measure. Visual world researchers who study word-level phenomena will often account for their data in terms of lexical activation and competition effects. Eye tracking with text and visual world eye tracking thus appear to provide complementary perspectives on language processing and representation. Important finding of P. D. Allopenna study was that the empirical eye-movement data closely followed theoretical predictions of a spoken word recognition model, TRACE. The online search revealed a total of six visual world eye-tracking studies that examined topics in word recognition.
