Using eye movements as a developmental measure within psycholinguistics

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 these assumptions are valid, though care is needed when disentangling developmental changes in visual attention from developmental changes in language processing abilities.