Measuring where the eyes fixate, and for how long, has arguably been the most valuable way of exploring the time-course of comprehending written sentences. This chapter reviews some of the history of the method’s use as well as some recent developments. It provides an extensive review of what eye movement measurement has told us about the syntactic processing of sentences, covering topics such as syntactic ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity resolution, retrieval from memory, syntactic prediction, and syntactic complexity. Alternative models for how syntactic and extra-syntactic information...

Measuring where the eyes fixate, and for how long, has arguably been the most valuable way of exploring the time-course of comprehending written sentences. This chapter reviews some of the history of the method’s use as well as some recent developments. It provides an extensive review of what eye movement measurement has told us about the syntactic processing of sentences, covering topics such as syntactic ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity resolution, retrieval from memory, syntactic prediction, and syntactic complexity. Alternative models for how syntactic and extra-syntactic information sources are integrated are discussed. The chapter then turns to a discussion of what the eyes actually do in response to syntactic processing complexity, and provides a brief review of models of eye movement control. It concludes by comparing eye movement measurement with other methods of measuring online sentence comprehension processes.