Comparing Eye Tracking with Electrooculography for Measuring Individual Sentence Comprehension Duration

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience

Background:

• The audio-visual paradigm by Wendt et al. (2015) is valuable for studying sentence comprehension but presents practical challenges.
• Existing methods require extensive measurement time and complex analysis procedures.

Purpose of the Study:

• To validate a modified audio-visual paradigm with reduced practical challenges.
• To assess the efficacy of shorter measurement sets and electrooculography (EOG) for estimating sentence processing duration.
• To compare bootstrap procedures with growth curve analysis for eye-tracking data.

Main Methods:

• Reduced measurement time by using a smaller dataset with fewer trials.
• Introduced electrooculography (EOG) as an alternative to eye tracking for recording eye movements.
• Employed growth curve analysis as an alternative to bootstrap procedures for analyzing eye-tracking data.

Main Results:

• A smaller measurement set yielded comparable results to the original full set.
• Eye tracking and EOG showed a high correlation (r = 0.97), indicating suitability for processing duration estimation.
• Both growth curve analysis and bootstrap procedures demonstrated similar findings regarding processing durations and sentence complexity effects.

Conclusions:

• The validated audio-visual paradigm is more practical for assessing sentence comprehension.
• Electrooculography (EOG) offers a viable alternative to eye tracking for this paradigm.
• Growth curve analysis provides results comparable to traditional bootstrap methods for eye-tracking data analysis.