Online eye tracking and real-time sentence processing: On opportunities and efficacy for capturing psycholinguistic effects of different magnitudes and diversity

Abstract

Online research methods have the potential to facilitate equitable accessibility to otherwise-expensive research resources, as well as to more diverse populations and language combinations than currently populate our studies. In psycholinguistics specifcally, webcam-based eye tracking is emerging as a powerful online tool capable of capturing sentence processing efects in real time. The present paper asks whether webcam-based eye tracking provides the necessary granularity to replicate efects—crucially both large and small—that tracker-based eye tracking has shown. Using the Gorilla Experiment Builder platform, this study set out to replicate two psycholinguistic efects: a robust one, the verb semantic constraint efect, frst reported in Altmann and Kamide, Cognition 73(3), 247–264 (1999), and a smaller one, the lexical interference efect, frst examined by Kukona et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(2), 326 (2014). Webcam-based eye tracking was able to replicate both efects, thus showing that its functionality is not limited to large efects. Moreover, the paper also reports two approaches to computing statistical power and discusses the diferences in their outputs. Beyond discussing several important methodological, theoretical, and practical implications, we ofer some further technical details and advice on how to implement webcam-based eye-tracking studies. We believe that the advent of webcam-based eye tracking, at least in respect of the visual world paradigm, will kickstart a new wave of more diverse studies with more diverse populations.