Evaluation of Web Experiments

Psycholinguistic and cognitive psychology studies involving self-paced reading (SPR) paradigm are usually carried out in conventional laboratory settings. This is mainly due to the need for accurate response time measurements in such experiments. This project explores the potentials and limitations of web-based SPR experiments. The existing timing component of WebExp2, an experiment generator, was evaluated and a published lab-based SPR experiment was replicated and conducted over the Internet using WebExp2. The main findings show that WebExp2’s current timing component is capable of measuring response time accurately up to 50 ms. Results from the web-based SPR experiment produced a near-perfect replication of the general pattern found in the original study albeit having slower reading times. These findings suggest that the World Wide Web may be a viable alternative for researches conducting SPR exper-iments. i Acknowledgement