The Importance of Eye Movement Research for Gaining Insight into Morphological Processing
Raymond Bertram, Jukka Hyönä · 2023
During the last 50 years, eye-tracking has become a highly popular method to study natural language processing. Especially recently, the number of eye-tracking studies has increased exponentially, as eye-trackers have become less expensive and more user-friendly. In the realm of morphology, eye-tracking is used to answer a number of important questions. In this chapter, we discuss how eye movement studies inform us about the temporal unfolding of morphological information during the processing of complex words. Moreover, we discuss studies demonstrating the role sentence context may have on morphological processing. Finally, we discuss eye-tracking studies on the role of morphology in more applied domains such as second language acquisition and language development, and among special populations. Here, the main focus is on how individual differences in morphological skills show up in the eye movement record. The final section demonstrates how broadly eye-tracking is used in studying morphology, and includes suggestions for further research.