What Can Our Eyes Tell Us About Language? Eye Tracking

What do our eyes do while we read written language? What can their movements tell us about our processing? In this week's episode, we look at eye tracking: how we can measure these small movements, what following how people read shows us about processing, and how even just studying how we look at pictures can unlock how our brains approach incoming words.
This is Topic #59!
This week's tag language: Malay!
Related topics:
Walking the Garden Path: Parsing Strategies - • How Do We Interpret Se...
Last episode:
Building Common Ground - • How Do We Create a Sha...
Other of our psycholinguistics videos:
Prime Time: Priming - • How Are Words Connecte...
Just Hearing Things: Phonological Illusions - • Phonological Illusions
Gender on the Brain: Gender and Language Processing - • Gender and Language Pr...
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Looking forward to next week!

[@sametrianetsanet]

Great page! Thanks!

[@msy5535]

Hi Ling Space & Moti, I'm a fan of your channel; i have a question as a linguist in training; 1) What are the implications of eye tracking in second language learning? Because in our first language it always seems 'easier' than in a second language. Is it the obvious truth, being because we didn't acquire rather learnt/ learning (thus being able to take in whole words and sentences, as opposed to only fragments) or because from a psycho-linguistic view our brains are doing a lot more in the second language than the first? (a.k.a reading, taking in information, internalizing, comprehension?)

[@mebeasensei]

I don't understand how your possible answers to your own question are connected to it. 1) What are the implcations of eye-tracking? OK. fair enough. Extremely broad question. Then you suggest that somehow, eye tracking will support the so called distinction between learning and acquisition by showing us that we spend more time reading it - or moving our eyes back and forth? I don't see how eye-tracking can prove there is a distinction between acq and learning and I don't even agree that the distinction is clear. Just because we can predict chunking or recognize familiar phrases faster doesn't mean we must have 'acquired' them instead of 'learned' them. Secondly, just say the language bits of our brains are more busy processing L2, engaging more parts of the brain etc/. what would busy eyes tell us? Not much I guess, unless we connected it to something else at the same time, like say a comprehension or imagination task. Anyway, I'm interested in L2 and eye-tracking but I don't know why. I don't know what it would prove, but I do want to play with eye-tracking stuff, especially with odd L2 malformed sentences.

[@pedrohgmuniz]

Nice videos! I've just subscribed to your channel and watched this and a couple of other videos. Keep up the good work! Unfortunately I could'nt find the extra content about this topic on your web site. The link you provide in the description is broken...

[@manel2432]

Hi, thanks for that video really helped me with Psycholinguistics class. I'm preparing a dissertation about "The role of educational video games on teaching EFL" Can you suggest any interesting game ? Any Ideas? Pieces of advice? Thanks in advance!!

[@msy5535]

+Manel Dahmani www.ted.com/talks/ajit_narayanan_a_word_game_to_communicate_in_any_language Talks about an interesting learning app in India. I'm sure also, if you looked on app stores you would be able to find some educational games. Also, from my own experience Kahoot (getkahoot.com) is a brilliant online quiz where students can compete against one another. Hope this helps.

[@manel2432]

+큰매트 Thank you so much!

[@codevvv7879]

i did not correctly interpreted any of the ensemble sentences :(

[@yugofranc]

Ah, nice Steven Universe references.

[@thelingspace]

+yugofranc Thanks! Glad you caught them. Still waiting for more episodes... >_

[@Psylinguist]

The bookshelf and the t-shirt is distractimg me from the content of the presentation. Too pinky