This grant allows the investigator to purchase a system for monitoring eye-movements during reading, and to conduct three experiments on sentence comprehension. When people read, their eyes jump from one fixation point to the next rather than moving smoothly across the page. The eye-movement monitoring system measures the duration and position of each fixation, as well as the direction and length of the jump (saccade). Eye-tracking is widely regarding as the premier measure of processing load during initial syntactic processing (in the visual modality) for two reasons. First, it is a naturalistic task that does not interrupt the natural rate of reading nor introduce any secondary task. Second, it yields a multi-dimensional record of processing load. The project is designed to further research on sentence comprehension in two ways. First, it is a study in converging methods. The experiments compare eye movements with several other experimental paradigms, some of which are quite new. These include an on-line sensibility judgment task, a cross-modal integration paradigm in which some parts of the sentence are presented auditorally and some parts are presented visually, and the measurement of event-related potentials using scalp electrodes. A second goal is to identify the range of processing phenomena to which eye-tracking data are sensitive, and to determine whether first pass fixations, regressions (backward eye movements), and second pass fixations are all indicative of the same aspects of processing. This POWRE award serves professional goals of the investigator-adding an eye-tracking system to her lab will enable her to explore a new research area and increase the range of experimental methodologies at her disposal. Much of the best work in the field is done using the eye movement methodology. The ability to collect data under this paradigm will greatly enhance the investigator's research activities, making it easier to publish new research, obtain extramural funding, and compare her own research to that of the best researchers in the field. ? ?Ã?/?Â¥_Ã>Â¥ />? Â¥? ©Ã? >Ã?%` ?©?¢Ã> Â?Ã%?
