engleski

Eye-tracking as a measure of cognitive processes in children: The two paradigms

In the recent years eye-tracking has proved itself as a good instrument for studying cognitive functions such as memory, attention or language. In language related studies two major paradigms have been developed: the listening paradigm and the reading paradigm. In the listening paradigm subjects listen to a sentence while watching a scene or pictures related to the sentence. In the reading paradigm subjects simply read a sentence presented on a computer screen. In both paradigms a number of dependent measures can be obtained: fixation number, duration or position, saccade number or the number of back saccades. The information about the cognitive processes are obtained by manipulating the content of the sentences and pictures or grammatical complexity of the sentences etc. For each paradigm an example is given: for the listening paradigm a study of anticipatory gaze in children with typical language development (age 9-10) and in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) will be presented. It is expected that the children with SLI are particularly affected in processing grammatical information and that the experiment would reveal their specific weaknesses in language processing. In this study the anticipatory gaze depends on the fast build-up of the syntactic structure (argument structure of the verb). The pictures that accompany each sentence represent either the (syntactic) arguments of the verbs (in one experimental condition) or objects of semantically related words (with the mismatch in gender so that they cannot be grammatically correct arguments). Anticipatory gaze proved to be greater in the group of children with typical language development (our control group) while the children with SLI showed small anticipatory gaze in the syntactic condition and greater in the semantic condition. This indicated their compensatory strategy for the impairment that affects mainly morphosyntactic processing. In the second experiment the reading paradigm was used to test the psycholinguistic reality of the argument structure and the theory behind the concept of the Aktionsart (classification of the verbs according to the type of action they encode and the number of arguments they have). To this end the grammatical notion of the aspect in Croatian (or any other Slavic language) can be well exploited since the majority of perfective/imperfective pairs show differences only in the Aktionsart and, therefore, in the argument structure (e.g. while čitati 'to read:IMPF' can have one argument, pročitati 'to read:PFV' must have at least two). Therefore, sentences that change the verb from imperfective to perfective can easily be constructed with a violation in the constituent (argument) structure. A number of back-saccades in the specific place in the sentence has shown to be a good measure of cognitive processes that are related to the constituent (argument) structure processing, i.e. that can be traced to specific syntactic processing.

eye tracking; reading paradigm; listening paradigm

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