A technical introduction to using speakers’ eye movements to study language

Everything you wanted to know about eye movement monitoring but were afraid to ask: This is a primer for researchers new to the use of eye-tracking and particularly those with an interest in language production. It summarizes the early history of eye movement monitoring in language production research, briefly reviews the relationship between visual attention and eye movements, and details the practical concerns of collecting and analyzing gaze data. In particular, the paper discusses the features and functions of available eye-tracking software and hardware systems, as well as tools for automatically processing speech. We close with a review of dependent measures that have been derived from eye movement data as well as how they were used and interpreted.