Tobii EyeTracking's List: Linguistics

ABSTRACT
Auditory prominence is defined as when an acoustic segment is made salient in its context. Prominence is one of the prosodic functions that has been shown to be strongly correlated with facial movements. In this work, we investigate the effects of facial prominence cues, in terms of gestures, when synthesized on animated talking heads. In the first study, a speech intelligibility experiment is conducted, speech quality is acoustically degraded and the fundamental frequency is removed from the signal, then the speech is presented to 12 subjects through a lip synchronized talking head carrying head-nods and eyebrows raise gestures, which are synchronized with the auditory prominence. The experiment shows that presenting prominence as facial gestures significantly increases speech intelligibility compared to when these gestures are randomly added to speech. We also present a follow-up study examining the perception of the behavior of the talking heads when gestures are added over pitch accents. Using eye-gaze tracking technology and questionnaires on 10 moderately hearing impaired subjects, the results of the gaze data show that users look at the face in a similar fashion to when they look at a natural face when gestures are coupled with pitch accents opposed to when the face carries no gestures. From the questionnaires, the results also show that these gestures significantly increase the naturalness and the understanding of the talking head.

ABSTRACT
An empirical study of how a simplification of complex syntactic structures in English medical texts affects processing and comprehension for Danish medical experts.

ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on on-line metacognitive processes, in particular, comprehension monitoring in reading. Interesting prospects of technology-supported on-line methods for metacognitive studies on comprehension monitoring are outlined on the basis of current empirical evidence. First, the on-line methods to study comprehension monitoring are described and discussed, and our studies of elementary (Grade 1–6) school students’ monitoring and regulating comprehension feature the application of two of the methods, namely traced silent reading and eyetracking. Second, these studies give evidence on young students’ comprehension monitoring and developmental trends as a function of grade, decoding skills, listening and reading comprehension skills and intervention. As an example, results from a recent study linking students’ comprehension monitoring, mood and metacognitive experiences are presented in more detail. The future promise and prospects of technology-supported on-line comprehension monitoring methods for metacognition research and of assessing affects associated with comprehension monitoring processes are discussed. It is argued that the modern technology allowing synchronized data collection of affective reactions and reading comprehension behavior offer important new opportunities to enhance current theories and empirical knowledge, particularly, of linkages between emotional and metacognitive processes.

ABSTRACT
This article investigates the acquisition of the focus particle auch 'also' by German-learning children. We report data from spontaneous and elicited production of utterances with the focus particle auch by 1- to 4-year-olds complementing earlier findings of a delayed production of the unaccented auch compared to the accented one. But in contrast to previous studies showing that children have problems interpreting sentences with accented and unaccented auch, we found indications for adult-like comprehension in an eye-tracking experiment by children from 3 years on. These results reflect early availability of adult-like linguistic competence with respect to both auch-variants which does not always lead to adult-like performance. This variation in children's performance across tasks is considered to be due to additional modality and task specific constraints. Development in this area thus reflects not a change in underlying knowledge, but rather a change in the constraints on its behavioral manifestation.

ABSTRACT
We report on an experiment where the decision behavior of annotators issuing linguistic metadata is observed with an eyetracking device. As experimental conditions we consider the role of textual context and linguistic complexity classes. Still preliminary in nature, our data suggests that semantic complexity is much harder to deal with than syntactic one, and that full-scale textual context is negligible for annotation, with the exception of semantic high-complexity cases. We claim that such observational data might lay the foundation for empirically grounded annotation cost models and the design of cognitively adequate annotation user interfaces.

ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on an exploratory study, which asked whether eye-tracking technology could help determine what learners attend to in an L2 SCMC task-based learning environment. Eight learners of English completed a two-way information gap with a native speaker of English. The learners’ eye movements were captured using a Tobii 1750 eye tracker. Learner eye movements immediately following a recast by the native speaker were evaluated for duration of eye fixation on the recast. Instances of learner uptake following recasts were also calculated. Results suggest that learners notice just over 60% of intensive recasts. The results also show that lexical recasts were much easier for learners to notice, retain, and use productively in subsequent chat interaction than were grammatical recasts. Further, learners were able to use the noticed lexical recast items more accurately than the noticed grammatical items on the post-test writing measure. Successful uptake ­following recasts was found to occur rarely. Finally, the data suggest that methodologically it may be problematic to consider learner uptake a strong measure of noticing. A call is made for follow-up studies using eye-tracking technology in the exploration of noticing, especially those which seek to correlate the eye-gaze ­measure of noticing with other, more established measures of noticing.

ABSTRACT
A well-known finding in the literature on language acquisition is that English-speaking children as old as 6 frequently misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the local referential subject. However, the percentage of errors with respect to this so-called Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) varies substantially across studies. Conroy, Takahashi, Lidz and Phillips (2009) showed that in English the DPBE disappears when an elaborate context is presented in which the correct referent and the correct sentence interpretation are made accessible. They conclude from this that English-speaking children possess knowledge of Principle B but are hindered by a discourse context in which the potential referents and interpretations are not appropriately balanced. A similar disappearance of the DPBE was shown for Dutch by Spenader, Smits and Hendriks (2009). However, rather than presenting children with an elaborate context, they used a short introductory sentence that unambiguously established the correct referent as the discourse topic. They interpret their results as indicating that children’s grammar underdetermines the interpretation of pronouns. Because children’s interpretations only conform to Principle B if the discourse structure provides a clear topic, they conclude that children’s comprehension of pronouns is sensitive to discourse structure and that children are actually helped by the discourse. ...

ABSTRACT
Two recent studies ([Johnson et al., 2005] and [Perez-Leroux, 2005]) found that English- and Spanish-learning children do not show the ability to use verb inflection as a cue to subject number before the age of 5 to 6 years. These findings suggest an asymmetric development as verb inflections are usually correctly produced before this age.
In the present study we investigated whether German 3- to 4-year-olds take advantage of the information provided by the verb inflection in sentence comprehension. In a first study, children's looking behavior at two pictures was measured after presentation of a sentence in which the subject number was coded only by the verb inflection. The results from this study suggest that children's looks reflect correct interpretation of the sentences and thus show their ability to make use of verb inflection. In a second experiment, preferential looking was combined with an additional task in which the children had to point to the matching picture. In this case children did not perform above chance level.
Our results underline the relevance that specific task demands have on the performance of children in comprehension testing. These have to be accounted for when interpreting findings on production and comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition.

ABSTRACT
In this paper, we describe how eyetracking has been used in exploratory experiments to inform the design of screening tests for dyslexic students by examining their eye gaze while reading Arabic texts. Findings reveal differences in the intensity of eye gaze and reading patterns between dyslexic readers and non-dyslexic controls. Dyslexics consistently exhibited longer fixation durations, shorter saccades, and more regressions. Moreover, results suggest that eye movement patterns are a reflection of the cognitive processes occurring during reading of texts in both Arabic deep and shallow orthographies. Applicability of eye movement analysis in investigating the nature of the reading problems and tailoring interventions to the particular needs of individuals with dyslexia is discussed.

Introduction
A rapid development of eye tracking technology has been observed in recent years. Today's eye trackers can determine the current focus point of the eye precisely while being relatively unobtrusive in their application. Also, a variety of research and commercial ...

Chapter 3
This chapter describes and evaluates the use of eyetracking methods to study the development of spoken language production and comprehension. The emphasis will be on understanding the chain of inferences, or linking assumptions, researchers commonly make when going from measurements of eye position to conclusions about attention, reference and sentence parsing. It is argued that to a large extent these assumptions are reasonable, though care is needed when disentangling developmental changes in visual-attention from developmental changes in language processing abilities.

ABSTRACT
This study examined participants’ comprehension of Web privacy policies when the information from the policy had to be recalled from memory or when participants were able to view the policy while searching for the answers to specific questions. Eye-gaze data were analyzed to examine where users focus their attention when reading privacy policies and searching for information in them. Overall, participants showed poor comprehension of the information conveyed in the privacy policies even though they were written at the participants’ level of education. When searching for information in the privacy policies, participants relied on the listing of individual sections provided at the beginning of a privacy policy, when available. When the listing of sections was not available, participants skimmed the entire policy, examining the headings and first few words of each paragraph to determine whether the sections or paragraphs were likely to contain the information for which they were searching.

ABSTRACT
Most research on text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in language learning has used output logs as the sole data source. I review interactionist and sociocultural SCMC research, focusing in particular on the question of technological determinism, and conclude that, from whichever perspective, reliance on output logs leads to an impoverished picture of the experience of SCMC users and of phenomena relevant to learning. The assumption that output logs are an adequate data source fails to give due weight to the specificities of this form of communication, in particular the constraints and affordances of the computer interface. I examine the potential contribution of other data sources, providing by way of illustration an analysis of sample eye-tracker data from a tandem SCMC session.

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study was to examine typically developing infants' integration of audio-visual sensory information as a fundamental process involved in early word learning. One hundred sixty pre-linguistic children were randomly assigned to watch one of four counterbalanced versions of audio-visual video sequences. The infants' eye-movements were recorded and their looking behavior was analyzed throughout three repetitions of exposure-test-phases. The results indicate that the infants were able to learn covariance between shapes and colors of arbitrary geometrical objects and to them corresponding nonsense words. Implications of audio-visual integration in infants and in non-human animals for modeling within speech recognition systems, neural networks and robotics are discussed.

ABSTRACT
The use of eye movements in reading research is explained in a case study on the influence of bold type font and bullet lists on the comprehension of short explanatory texts. The article focuses on how meaningful reading times can be calculated from eye movements and discusses the software Fixation which allows for easy analysis of eye movements and data preparation for statistical testing.

ABSTRACT
Graphs are often accompanied by text, i.e. linguistically coded information, augmenting the information presented diagrammatically. Thus, graph comprehension by humans often constitutes comprehension and integration of information provided by different representational modalities, namely graphical elements and verbal constituents. In this study we focus on textual annotations to line graphs providing information about events, processes and their temporal properties as well as temporal relations about the events and processes in question. We present results of an experimental investigation on parameters which influence subject’s interpretations concerning the temporal properties of the annotated events and on eye movement behavior. In particular, we discuss the role of graph shape and the role of graphical means for relating textual annotations and determined parts of the graph line.

The paper reports on a study investigating directionality in translation
processes by means of eye tracking. The following hypotheses are tested:
(1) in both directions of translation, processing the TT requires more
cognitive effort than processing the ST; (2) L2 translation tasks on the
whole require more cognitive effort than L1 tasks; (3) cognitive effort
invested in the processing of the ST is higher in L1 translation than in L2 translation; (4) cognitive effort invested in the processing of the TT is higher in L2 translation than in L1 translation; and (5) in both directions, students invest more cognitive effort in translation tasks than do professionals. The hypotheses are tested through a series of experiments involving student and professional subjects who translate two comparable texts, one into their L1 (Danish) and the other into their L2 (English). The following data from the translation tasks are analyzed: gaze time, average fixation duration, total task length and pupil dilation, all of which are assumed to be indicative of cognitive effort. Only the first hypothesis is found to be wholly confirmed by our data; the remaining hypotheses are only partially confirmed, that is, confirmed by some indicators and not by others, or confirmed for only one group of subjects.

Abstract
In the following empirical study the influence of hypertext structures on the processing of information will be examined using eye tracking data. It will be tested whether the organizational structure of hypertexts influences navigational behaviour. Moreover we want to find out whether the information architecture has an effect on the number and duration of fixations and reading comprehension. A source text on the topic of speed reading consisting of 597 words was converted into an axial and a networked hypertext. The subjects in this test series were 22 students of English and American studies from Graz University, who were all on the level of C1 according to the common European Framework of Reference. To sample the position of the user’s eye on an average of every 20 ms the Eye Tracker Tobii 1750 was used. The data were analyzed using the software program Clearview. The eye tracking data depicting scan paths and hot spot images of areas of highest fixation count suggest that prototypical hypertext structures trigger prototypical gaze patterns, which means that the order in which links and nodes received their first fixation was stable. The average dwell time in the defined areas of interest was lower in the network structure while the axial structure produced fewer regressive eye movements and caused fewer orientation problems. The presentation format did not significantly affect comprehension.

Abstract
This study examined the influence of cognitive styles on navigation patterns in hypertext environment. 20 undergraduate students from the Foreign Language Department were pre-tested on their cognitive styles, computer use and ability and prior knowledge about content presented in hypertext environment. All participants completed the Group-Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), Internet Influence and prior knowledge tests. Then they were asked to complete 6 tasks and navigate on a hypertext material on the planet Neptune. While they were reading the material, their eye movements were recorded by on eye-tracker device. The results were analyzed by measuring the fixation duration and eye-gaze points of the participants with regard to visited, revisited page numbers and navigation complexity. At the end of the study a recall performance test was applied. Results showed that cognitive style has no effect on recall performance, and navigational pattern while eye-fixation number on relevant information has significant effect on retention.

ABSTRACT
This study concerns the processes of eye movements during simple sight-reading tasks, concentrating on the processing of melodic groups separated by larger intervals and the effects of metrical placement of such groups. Thirty-two participants with varying musical background sight-read eight short melodies in two separate sessions. Eye movements during playing were recorded using an eye-tracker, and the performances on an electric piano with sequencer software. The melodies in question were of two types: melodic groupings were either aligned with the metrical divisions or made to overlap with them. The results indicate that reinspections to previously fixated notes during sight-reading increased with previous musical experience. During the performance of a single melody, the alignment of melodic groups with metrical units led to a gradual decrease of reinspections. Within the melodic groups themselves, the second notes of the groups received the largest total processing times. In addition, processing differences for notes involved in larger melodic intervals emerged depending on the visual placement of the notes within, or below, the staff system. Possible explanations of these findings as well as implications for future sight-reading studies will be discussed.