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Kathleen M. Eberhard studies psycholinguistics, especially the production of language and coordination during conversation. Her Notre Dame profile identifies research on subject-verb grammatical agreement, including a theoretical account and computational model published in 2005. It also documents her contribution to the visual world paradigm, which times listeners' fixations to objects during spoken comprehension.^[ref]

These questions make grammar experimentally observable. For an illustrative production task, compare a singular head followed by a singular modifier with the same head followed by a plural modifier, while holding the intended grammatical agreement fixed. Errors and response timing can help discriminate accounts of how speakers build the utterance. This is a schematic experimental contrast, not a numerical result attributed to her work. Her institutional research statement also connects language production to bilingualism and the coordination of understanding in dialogue.

Michael K. Tanenhaus is a researcher in psycholinguistics associated with the University of Rochester. Its directory identifies his interests in language and reading comprehension and his emeritus appointment in brain and cognitive sciences and linguistics.^[ref]

With Michael Spivey, Kathleen M. Eberhard and Julie Sedivy, he developed experiments connecting eye tracking to interpretation of spoken instructions. Their 1995 study used real objects and a head-mounted tracker; varying the visible referents altered how a temporarily ambiguous instruction was interpreted.^[ref] This visual world paradigm makes the time course of sentence comprehension experimentally accessible. A fixation is evidence about allocation of attention during a controlled task; it must be interpreted through the alternatives available to the participant.

The visual world paradigm investigates spoken language processing by recording eye tracking while a listener views a scene and hears an utterance. The timing and destinations of fixations provide evidence about which visible referents are being considered during sentence comprehension. The scene can contain real objects or displayed pictures.

In Michael K. Tanenhaus and colleagues' 1995 experiment, a head-mounted tracker recorded eye movements while listeners followed instructions to manipulate real objects. An instruction temporarily allowed a towel phrase to describe either an apple's location or a destination. Comparing scenes with one or two apples changed the referential usefulness of that phrase and affected interpretation.^[ref]

The crucial comparison holds much of the linguistic input constant while manipulating relevant visual context. Fixations require time to plan and execute, so they must be aligned with the utterance and interpreted through the task's alternatives. This makes the paradigm a controlled link between a theory of comprehension and a timed behavioral record.