A beginner's guide to eye tracking for psycholinguistic studies of reading

Abstract

Eye tracking has been a popular methodology used to study the visual, cognitive, and linguistic processes underlying word recognition and sentence parsing during reading for several decades. However, the successful use of eye tracking requires researchers to make deliberate choices about how they apply this technique, and there is wide variability across labs and fields with respect to which choices are "standard." We aim to provide an easy-to-reference guideline that can help new researchers with their entrée into eye-tracking-while-reading research. Because the standards do - and should - vary from field to field or study to study as is appropriate for the research question, we do not set a rigid recipe for handling eye tracking data, but rather provide a conceptual framework within which researchers can make informed decisions about how to treat their data so that it is most informative for their research question. Therefore, this paper provides a description of eye movements in reading and an overview of psycholinguistic research on the topic, an overview of experiment design considerations, a description of the data processing pipeline and important choice points and implications, an overview of common dependent measures and their calculation, and a summary of resources for data analysis.

Keywords: Data processing; Eye tracking; Reading; Sentence processing; Word recognition.