The On-line Study of Sentence Comprehension: Eyetracking, ERPs and Beyond

This book contains eighteen chapters addressing important findings, assumptions, problems, hopes and future guidelines on the use of advanced research techniques to study the moment-by-moment mental processes that occur while a reader or listener is understanding language. The core techniques are Eyetracking and ERP, with some extensions to others such as fMRI. Eyetracking and ERPs are techniques widely used in the last two decades in the field of psycholinguistics. A vast amount of data has been collected with these two techniques that allow us to advance in our knowledge of the cognitive mechanisms and processes involved in comprehending and producing language. They also allow us to ask new questions for advancing in our theoretical knowledge. The book has been written by leading researchers in the field of psycholinguistics that are also leading experts in the use of these techniques. The book combines comprehensive overviews of the state of the art on theoretical progress and assumptions behind the use ofeye movements (reading and visual world) and ERP methods with papers that address specific research questions through the use of these techniques. It addresses not only methodological issues but also discuss the theoretical progress that has been made on understanding language processing using temporally fine-grained methods.