Self-Guided Reading: Touch-Based Measures of Syntactic Processing

A novel online reading methodology termed Self-Guided Reading (SGR) is examined to determine if it can successfully detect well-studied syntactic processing behaviours. In SGR, a participant runs their finger under masked text in order to reveal a sentence. It is therefore similar to self-paced reading in presentation of stimuli, but different in the motion that the participant makes to interact with the stimuli. The phenomena of relative clause, adverb and noun phrase/sentential attachment are utilised to allow comparison to previous research that employed self-paced reading and eye-tracking. SGR was able to detect the predicted processing behaviours in all sentence types. Moreover, once design choices and task effects are accounted for, SGR was the most consistent in triggering a motor movement change at the predicted point in the sentence. Able to provide a semi-continuous reading measure at low cost, SGR should be investigated further to uncover the full potential of the method for psycholinguistic research.