Printed word eye-tracking

One method employed frequently in the MaRCS project--and developed by its members--is printed word eye-tracking. In such experiments, participants see four words on a screen and hear a sentence. This type of set-up was first reported by McQueen and Viebahn (Quarterly journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 661-71).Huettig and McQueen (Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 460 - 482) compared the printed-word version with the more traditional picture version.

It has been extended to allow a "late" disambiguation by Mitterer & McQueen (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance, 35, 244-263). Have a look at the video down below. You'll here the Dutch version of the sentence "click on the word kus above the triangle". As you will see the participant will look at the upper left corner in the end, after considering the possibility that kust is the target to click on.

The instruction is slightly ambiguous, because kus can sound pretty similar to kust in running speech.

The nice aspect of this method is that the complete instruction is unambiguous. It is obvious that one has to click on the word above the triangle. But we do get a continuous "2AFC" pattern from the eye-movements before the object disambiguates the instruction.