12.2 Experiment: Regressions to Ambiguities During Sentence Reading (MouseView)

Participants are shown written sentences containing lexical-semantic ambiguities. Sometimes the end of the sentence disambiguates the ambiguous word (e.g. ball) toward the subordinate (less-frequent) meaning (e.g. “Sally worried that the ball was going to be too crowded.”) and sometimes the final word is compatible with the dominant meaning (“…too expensive”). These sentences are presented on the screen while using the MouseView extension, which tracks visual attention over time by hiding/blurring the page content but providing a small viewing window (aperture) that the participant controls with the mouse. The participant reads each sentence by positioning the mouse on the left-hand side of the sentence and moving it toward the right as they read. The dependent measure is the frequency of regressions back to the ambiguous word after reaching the disambiguating word at the end of the sentence.

Key topics covered: - Using the jsPsych MouseView extension