ABSTRACT
Eye monitoring has been used less frequently in studies of language production than in other areas of psycholinguistics, most notably visual word recognition, reading, and auditory language comprehension (for discussions of the use of eye tracking in these research areas see the chapters by Altmann & Kamide (2004), Rayner & Liversedge (2004), Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Hanna (2004) in the present volume). One reason for this is that many eye-tracking systems offering high spatial resolution require the participants to sit absolutely still, which is often enforced by using a bite bar or chin rest. However, high-accuracy eye-tracking systems that allow for some head and body movements have now been available for more than a decade. But one may wonder why anyone would want to use eye tracking to study language production. Widely used research methods in this area are analyses of spontaneously occurring and induced speech errors, disfluencies, and tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states and the elicitation of single words (usually nouns) using drawings of objects or definitions. Sentence-level planning processes are often studied using sentence-completion or recall tasks (for further discussion of methods of language production research see Bock, 1996). It is not obvious what could be gained by combining any of these paradigms with eye tracking.
