Using virtual reality to study reading: An eye-tracking investigation of transposed-word effects

Jonathan Mirault,Stéphane Dufau,Agnès Guerre-Genton,Jonathan Grainger

doi:10.1016/j.metip.2020.100029

Jonathan Mirault, Stéphane Dufau + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.metip.2020.100029

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Abstract

Abstract Eye movements were recorded using a virtual reality (VR) set-up as participants made grammatical decisions to sequences of words. Ungrammatical decisions were harder to make to transposed-word sequences (The white was cat big) compared with control sequences where transposing two adjacent words never produces a correct sentence (The black ran dog fat). Crucially, we found significant transposed-word effects independently of the order in which the two critical words were fixated (i.e., was before cat vs. cat before was), thus falsifying a reading out-of-order account of transposed-word effects.

Highlights

IntroductionEye-tracking has a long history in psycholinguistic research ever since the invention of the first eye-tracker (Huey, 1908)
The present study used eye-tracking with virtual reality (VR) goggles in order to i) demonstrate the feasibility of using such equipment to study reading, and ii) test one specific interpretation of transposed-word effects reported in a previous sentence reading study without eye-movement recordings
Mirault et al examined response times (RTs) and error rates for two types of ungrammatical sequence: one that was created by transposing two adjacent words in a correct sentence (e.g., The white was cat big), and one that could not be resolved into a correct sentence by transposing any two words (e.g., The black ran dog fat)

Summary

Introduction

Eye-tracking has a long history in psycholinguistic research ever since the invention of the first eye-tracker (Huey, 1908) It has been a paradigm of choice for investigating on-going lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing during natural reading. Such investigations have shown that certain eye movement measures, such as the time spent looking at a word, likely reflect on-line processing difficulty (see Rayner, 1998, 2007, for reviews). These investigations were led by a relatively small group of researchers who, at the time, had access to the equipment that could provide spatially and temporally accurate eye movement recordings. Virtual Reality (VR) goggles offer one such possibility, that provide the advantage of providing complete control over the entire field of vision during an experiment and allowing free head movements

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