Eye movements and morphological processing in reading

Abstract

In this article, I will give an overview of eye tracking studies on morphological processing since 2005 and a few earlier studies. An earlier survey article of Pollatsek and Hyönä (2006) covers almost all studies until then, but a number of interesting articles have been left undiscussed or were published after 2005. Before that, I will discuss (a) the advantages of studying morphological processing by means of eye tracking; (b) methodological issues related to eye movement experiments on morphological processing; (c) the dependent measures one can extract from the eye movement record and how they can be used in assessing the time course of morphological processing; (d) the boundary paradigm that has been used in morphological processing studies. I will argue that eye tracking should be used more often in morphological processing research, since it allows for studying morphologically complex words in a natural way and at the same time its rich data output allows for deeper levels of analyses than some other methods do.