ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a broad overview of the different measures that have been used in contemporary eye-tracking research in second language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism. Duration measures are the largest category of dependent variables in SLA and bilingualism research. First subgaze is the duration of all fixations in an interest area before the participant presses a button or makes some other type of overt response. Last fixation duration is the duration of the last eye fixation before a participant makes a response. This measure was introduced in the field of bilingualism by K. Miwa in a lexical decision study with eye tracking involving Japanese-English bilinguals. A basic principle in eye-tracking research is that it is better to include a range of different measures in order to obtain a more complete picture of participants’ viewing behavior. The eye-tracking software can count different things—fixations, skips, visits, and regressions.
