ELIA: a software application for integrating spoken language and eye movements

We have developed a new software application, Eye-gaze Language Integration Analysis (ELIA), which allows for the rapid integration of gaze data with spoken language input (either live or prerecorded). Specifically, ELIA integrates E-Prime output and/or .csv files that include eye-gaze and real-time language information. The process of combining eye movements with real-time speech often involves multiple error-prone steps (e.g., cleaning, transposing, graphing) before a simple time course analysis plot can be viewed or before data can be imported into a statistical package. Some of the advantages of this freely available software include (1) reducing the amount of time spent preparing raw eye-tracking data for analysis; (2) allowing for the quick analysis of pilot data in order to identify issues with experimental design; (3) facilitating the separation of trial types, which allows for the examination of supplementary effects (e.g., order or gender effects); and (4) producing standard output files (i.e., .csv files) that can be read by numerous spreadsheet packages and transferred to any statistical software.