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Eye Tracking and the Architecture of Grammar

Posted on Mar 29, 2010 | 0 comments

Eye Tracking and the Architecture of Grammar Across various languages, meaning is derived from grammar and the order of words on a page or in a spoken sentence. Change the order and structure, and you’ll very quickly create confusion and misunderstanding. While some authors and poets make it a habit to break the conventional rules of grammar and speech to create new meaning, the majority of us need to stick to a pretty strict structure in order to communicate with others. While speaking in your native tongue, you tend not to think about the architecture of grammar, as thoughts and words come fluidly to mind as they are verbalized. But try speaking in another language, and suddenly you find yourself hyper-conscious of grammar, word selection and order, and vocabulary, often tripping over your own sentences in a mash of gobbledygook.

For linguists, one way to understand the nature and architecture of grammar is to study children’s knowledge of grammar. But while the careful analysis of children’s spontaneous speech can offer an indication of their linguistic knowledge, these studies often fail to reveal the subtle distinctions involved in a child’s comprehension of linguistic structure. It’s no surprise, then, that many studies investigating a child’s linguistic knowledge use experimental methods, such as reaction time measurements, reading studies, and linguistic judgment methods. Still, the results are difficult to measure and interpret. That is why, according to a recent study published at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, many child language researchers have begun to use eye tracking methods to understand how children approach language and this architecture of grammar. One such study involving a choice between pictures with reference to a sentence suggests that recording children’s eye gaze patterns while they are listening to spoken utterances in the presence of a relevant reference world may be a promising approach to studying the acquisition of sentence meaning.

The eye tracking study referenced in the article was performed on participants in an effort to investigate adults’ and children’s knowledge and processing of sentences with reflexives. Something like this, for example:

The boy has placed the box behind himself/him.

In the study participants were shown two pictures and then asked a question about the pictures. One picture would show a boy and a man with a box behind the boy, and the other picture showed the same boy and the same man except with the box behind the man. The question was then asked: “Which picture shows that the boy has placed the box behind him?”

Adults had to press a button as fast as they could to indicate their choice, with their reaction times calculated. The 4- to 7-year old child participants were to choose the picture by pointing to it with their finger. The children’s reaction time’s were not measured, and rather than a question, they hear the instruction: “Now point to the picture where the boy has placed the box behind him.”

For the adults, measurements showed that the pronoun was referentially ambiguous, meaning the word “him” could reference the boy or the man. For children, the ambiguity reference was slightly delayed – they looked at one image and only after about 1000 milliseconds did they start looking at the other. The results suggest that, although children take longer than the adults to become aware of the ambiguity of the pronoun, they did in fact notice it, even if it didn’t affect their choice of picture.

What does eye-tracking reveal about children’s knowledge of linguistic structure?

Eye Tracking and the Architecture of Grammar

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