Eye-tracking Facilities

The Department of Language & Linguistics hosts three up-to-date eye-movement monitoring laboratories that supplement its existing laboratory facilities for carrying out self-paced reading or listening, cross-modal lexical decision and other reaction-time experiments on human language processing.

Human language processing is an extremely rapid and accurate process with decisions made at very high processing rates. An adult native speaker with normal speech rate produces some 150 words per minute - that is one word every half second. Under time pressure, a native speaker can produce one word every 200 ms without causing listeners any comprehension problems. The mental lexicon of an average native speaker of English comprises about 30,000 words. This means that in fluent speech you have to continuously choose from these 30,000 alternatives at a rate of up to five times per second. Still, despite the high speed of language processing, errors in the production and comprehension of words and sentences are very rare.

Psycholinguists study the processes involved in language comprehension and production and ask questions such as:

• What determines whether a sentence or a word is easy or difficult to comprehend or produce?
• Which words or other units of language do we directly retrieve from memory and which ones do we compute from smaller bits (e.g. walk-ed, clever-ness, move-ment)?
• How do we process words or sentences with multiple meanings? For example, in a sentence such as I went to the bank yesterday, do we think of both meanings of the word bank (= financial institution, side of a river) when we hear or read that sentence?

As language processing takes place so rapidly, it is not possible to answer these questions from simple observation. Instead, we need experimental set-ups that allow for the study of language processing in real time, that is, in the millisecond range. Our suite of eye-tracking laboratories provides one of the best currently available facilities to examine these questions. For more information, click on the following links:

• Eye-tracking lab 1
• Eye-tracking lab 2
• Eye-tracking lab 3

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This page is maintained by Sonja Eisenbeiss and was last updated on 09 July 2011.