Using eye-tracking in applied linguistics and second language research

Abstract

With eye-tracking technology the eye is thought to give researchers a window into the mind. Importantly, eye-tracking has significant advantages over traditional online processing measures: chiefly that it allows for more ‘natural’ processing as it does not require a secondary task, and that it provides a very rich moment-to-moment data source. In recognition of the technology’s benefits, an ever increasing number of researchers in applied linguistics and second language research are beginning to use it. As eye-tracking gains traction in the field, it is important to ensure that it is established in an empirically sound fashion. To do this it is important for the field to come to an understanding about what eye-tracking is, what eye-tracking measures tell us, what it can be used for, and what different eye-tracking systems can and cannot do. Further, it is important to establish guidelines for designing sound research studies using the technology. The goal of the current review is to begin to address these issues.

Promoting Grammatical Development Through Captions and Textual Enhancement in Multimodal Input-Based Tasks

“…The data generated were cleaned before being submitted to further analyses (Conklin & Pellicer-Sánchez, 2016). First, fixation durations shorter than 80 ms were removed.…”

Two or three lines: a mixed-methods study on subtitle processing and preferences

“…Finally, we analysed the number of revisits to the subtitle area, also referred to as 'returns' and 'rechecks' (Holmqvist et al, 2011). On the one hand, revisits have been found to show the semantic informativeness of an area (Holmqvist et al, 2011), but on the other hand they may reflect processing difficulty associated with returning to an area to recheck it (Conklin & Pellicer-Sánchez, 2016). In the context of subtitled videos, revisits show how people divide their visual attention between viewing the scene and reading the subtitles; a higher number of revisits may indicate less fluent and thus less efficient reading.…”

The use of eye-tracking in experimental approaches in second language acquisition research: the primary effects of Processing Instruction in the acquisition of the French imperfect

“…The personal pronoun before the verb was kept to a two-letter French pronoun. This was to minimize the effects on the data collection as words containing two letters are often skipped (Frenck-Mestre, 2005) and to maintain the position of the target feature (Conklin and Pellicer-Sánchez, 2016). The syntactic frames of both the target and distractor sentences were kept consistent to avoid significant changes in Figure 2.…”