ABSTRACT
Language comprehension is closely time-locked to the input. As auditory input unfolds, comprehenders’ eye movements shift to relevant regions in the visual context in a time-locked manner. By monitoring subjects’ eye gazes to real-world or depicted entities in contexts, visual-world paradigm eye-tracking provides a powerful tool to explore spoken language comprehension in real time. This technique has enabled a closer look into the interplay of visual context and linguistic information in spoken word recognition, sentence comprehension (e.g., syntactic parsing and semantic role assignment), discourse processing (e.g., pronoun resolution, comprehension of coherence relations), and pragmatic inference (e.g., processing of scalar implicature, perspective-taking). The current chapter reviews important concepts in visual world eye-tracking studies and classic works in spoken language comprehension using this approach. The focus is on the new insight this visual world paradigm has brought to the field of experimental linguistics. Methodological discussions include variants of tasks, choices of measures, different statistical approaches to analysing eye-movement data, as well as practical issues in preparing visual world eye-tracking studies and interpreting the results.
