Program

Eye-tracking is to-date one of the most powerful tools to investigate language acquisition and processing in real-time. Indeed, the development of this high-precision technology has allowed researchers to explore a large body of linguistic phenomena through eye-movement recording and analysis. Linguistic research with eye-tracking is mainly conducted exploiting two paradigms: the visual-world paradigm and text-reading.
Visual-world tasks allow for research with a large number of populations, including children and language-impaired participants.
This paradigm requires participants to look at a screen displaying pictures while listening to linguistic stimuli.
By contrast, reading tasks specifically focus on the reading process and are usually more demanding, especially for atypical populations, such as dyslexics or poor readers.
This seminar will be organized in two parts. During the first, we will overview how vision and language were found to be closely related, retracing the evolution of the eye-tracking methodology, and we will present the results from a series of experiments tackling different aspects of language processing (i.e., sentential negation, word and nonword reading, implicit learning, acquisition of adjectives, retrieval of phonological and semantic cues in bilingual sentence processing) in typical and atypical populations.
The second part will be more practical and will be held in the LaTeC laboratory where a mock eye-tracking experiment will be performed by participants.

Assessment

In class

Scheduled Lessons