ABSTRACT
Word-based interest areas are found across a range of research strands, including the bilingual lexicon and vocabulary acquisition, grammar acquisition and assessment. Eye-movement recordings tend to be less accurate when participants are looking to the outer edges of the screen. The most extreme case is track loss, a temporary interruption in recording due to the eye tracker’s inability to locate the eye gaze. Ecological validity dictates that the text features in an eye-tracking study should resemble those in natural reading as closely as possible, within the constraints of contemporary eye-tracking technology. Eye-tracking experiments consist of different stages, including camera set-up and calibration, instructions, practice trials, the main experiment, and any potential secondary tasks. Images in a visual world study should invite fast and consistent recognition, seemingly minor details such as image size or background color could have an unintended influence.
