Psycholinguistics investigates the mental processes involved in producing, understanding and learning language. It connects linguistic representations to observable behavior, including response times, errors and eye tracking. A grammatical description specifies possible structures; an experiment asks how a person processes a particular utterance as it unfolds.
Michael K. Tanenhaus and colleagues recorded eye movements with a head-mounted tracker while participants moved real objects following spoken instructions. In their apple experiment, the instruction “Put the apple on the towel in the box” was temporarily ambiguous: the towel phrase could identify an apple or its destination. Adding a second apple changed which interpretation the visual context supported, and the fixation patterns changed accordingly.[ref]
Integration of Visual and Linguistic Information in Spoken Language Comprehension by Michael K. Tanenhaus and others. Science 268,1632–1634; printed pp. 1633–1634, one/two-referent conditions and Figs. 1–3
This connects sentence comprehension to a timed behavioral measurement. The task supports an effect of visual context during processing; it does not make each fixation a direct readout of an isolated grammatical module.
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