ABSTRACT
Our goal in this chapter is to provide a resource for researchers using free-viewing eyetracking and the visual world paradigm to study language comprehension and production. This enterprise has been growing rapidly over the last several years and has yielded a large body of important work. It has also become increasingly clear that the research is based on many unexamined assumptions about what scenes are, how they are processed, and how eye movements are directed through them. It seemed to us that these assumptions needed to be made explicit and that it was time to bring the extant knowledge on eye movements in scene perception to bear on the use of the visual world paradigm to study psycholinguistics. We will begin by surveying the literature on the visual cognition of natural scenes, concentrating on what scenes are and how they are recognized. We then move on to the core of the chapter; which is a review of the literature on eye movements in scene perception. Our take-home message is that a great deal is already understood about scenes and how they are processed and that these findings are highly relevant to the assumptions and conclusions associated with the use of the visual world paradigm by language researchers.
