Salvatore Attardo & Lucy Pickering. Eye-tracking in linguistics London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. ISBN 978-1-3501-1751-8. 304 pp.

Abstract

<i>Eye-tracking in linguistics</i> by Salvatore Attardo and Lucy Pickering provides a comprehensive introduction to this methodology based on capturing eye movements for the purposes of studying human behaviour. Eye-tracking has gained increasing popularity over the past 20-30 years, as a result of fast advances in the technology supporting this method, with increasing accuracy and precision and an increase in the speed of capturing gaze. In addition, the prevalence of various eye-tracking devices has made eye-tracking technology more accessible, even though research based on eye-patterns is still largely skewed across continents and countries (Angele & Duñabeitia, 2024). What makes eye-tracking a suitable and versatile method is the underlying idea of a tight association between gaze behaviour and attention, the eye-mind hypothesis. The eye-mind hypothesis, originally proposed for the study of reading, is a theoretical framework which exploits eye movements as a window into cognitive processes (Rayner, 1977; Just & Carpenter, 1980; Rayner, 1998). Since, eye-tracking has proven a widely applicable method for the study not only of text decoding and comprehension, but also attention, semantic processing, violation processing, prediction in both spoken and written language (e.g., in the Visual World Paradigm), differences between populations of speakers, such as e.g., native speakers vs. second language users, typical readers vs. readers with learning and developmental disorders, children vs. experienced readers (adults). More recently, technological advances have made it possible to study dyadic and triadic communication and interaction, as well as human-machine interaction. The versatility of eye-tracking resides in the fact that it allows for capturing real-time language and information processing and the moment-to-moment deployment of participants’ attention to target aspects of the visual or auditory stimulus. While there exist a number of excellent sources on the tradition and details of the methodology (e.g., Rayner, 1998; Roberts & Siyanova-Chanturia, 2013), as well as comprehensive, but more specialised resources on specific fields of study, e.g., second language and bilingualism (Godfroid, 2019), the current volume aims to cover a wider spectrum of applications and is meant for an audience with little or no experience in the field. This is also rooted in the authors’ experience teaching a beginner’s graduate course for a variety of students.