Eye movements in written sentence production

Guido Nottbusch

Presentation held at the 1st Stavanger Reading and Writing Conference: "Theory, Methodology, Tools and Results", August 30th - September 5th 2007 in Stavanger, Norway

Abstract

Writing does not proceed as a steady production of segmental units, e.g. letters, words or phrases, in equal time steps. Instead, words and sentences have to be split into smaller linguistic units, presumably due to the limitations of processing modules. Therefore, time structures of written sentence production are determined by the properties of the words involved and also by superordinate conceptual and syntactic tasks. In order to test for the size of the units in varying syntactic contexts a picture describing task from Nottbusch et al. (2007) was replicated with the additional application of eye movement registration. By using different arrangements of coloured shapes (e.g. "The black arrow(s) and/with the red circle(s) are beside the yellow circle(s).") the effects of number, location and ordination were tested. By combining keystroke logging and eye movement data pauses triggered by eye movements towards the object in question (e.g. in case of loss of information in working memory), reading of already written text and objectless eye movements were separable. Correlations between the syntactic structures, pause types and pause lengths will be discussed.