A web-based mouse-tracking task for early perceptual language processing

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Studying language processing necessitates diverse linguistic data, free from participant awareness of being studied.
• Eye-tracking is valuable for minimizing demand characteristics but challenging for less-resourced languages.
• Existing methods face practical limitations in remote data collection for psycholinguistic research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel web-based mouse-tracking paradigm for remote language processing research.
• To demonstrate the utility of mouse-tracking for capturing early perceptual and semantic information.
• To provide a scalable alternative to eye-tracking for investigating a wide range of languages.

Main Methods:

• A web-based mouse-tracking task was designed, mimicking early video games to encourage early language input.
• The paradigm was validated by replicating findings from a previous eye-tracking study on reduced word recognition.
• Filler items were incorporated to assess the task's ability to capture predictive semantic processing.

Main Results:

• Mouse-tracking data successfully replicated key findings from an eye-tracking study on lexical processing.
• The paradigm demonstrated sensitivity to predictive semantic processing, as evidenced by filler item analysis.
• The results indicate that mouse-tracking can capture similar early perceptual data as eye-tracking.

Conclusions:

• The developed web-based mouse-tracking task offers a viable, remote-friendly alternative to eye-tracking for psycholinguistic research.
• This paradigm facilitates the study of lexical access, prosodic processing, and predictive semantic processing in diverse linguistic contexts.
• The approach enhances the feasibility of conducting large-scale language processing studies, especially for less-resourced languages.