Effects of syntactic cues on eye movements during sentence comprehension in young adults

Purpose: To use the eyetracking paradigm to explore how young healthy adults take advantage of semantic information provided by a verb cue versus syntactic information associated with WH- cues. The goal is to determine how predictive processing works in a young normal population. Method: 27 college-aged participants listened to audio content while simultaneously looking at a related visual display. Their eyes were tracked for the duration of the study in order to determine where they fixated during critical parts of each trial. Recordings of their eye movements were then statistically analyzed and interpreted. Results: The WH- cue has a much stronger and quicker effect on predictive tendencies than the verb cue alone. In WH- conditions, subjects fixated on the direct object both faster and more consistently than in the Y/N conditions. These results show that the verb cue alone has a weaker and slower effect on predictive tendencies than the WH- cue. Conclusion: For young unimpaired individuals, the WH- conditions allowed for faster prediction. These findings provide a basis for future studies which will help determine treatment for aphasia. Performing the same experiment on aphasic individuals will allow us to determine how to scaffold treatment efforts based on which cue is stronger and weaker for this population