Date of Award

2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology

Department

Communicative Disorders

First Advisor

Alisa Baron

Abstract

Eye tracking with a violation paradigm is an online, real-time measure, used within the field of second language acquisition to measure implicit or automatic knowledge (Godfroid, 2019). Native speakers (L1) demonstrate implicit knowledge, and second language learners (L2) exhibit various levels of developing implicit knowledge, which serves as a measure of proficiency. In a violation paradigm, L1 and L2 speakers read grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli. The eye-tracking data provides insight into participants’ sensitivity to grammatical violations. Previous studies have included comprehension questions, an offline measure, to ensure that participants read for meaning. However, eye tracking has rarely been applied to comprehension questions themselves, creating a methodological gap in the research. The present study fills this gap by investigating the relationships between eye-tracking measures, gaze duration and total duration, with accuracy and response time to comprehension questions.

A total of 37 participants, L1 (N = 10) and L2 (N = 27) Spanish speakers read grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in Spanish across two conditions, temporal reference and adverb placement. Each sentence was followed by a yes or no comprehension question.

Analysis using linear mixed-effects models reveals gaze duration and total duration do not predict either comprehension question accuracy or response time to comprehension questions for either condition, temporal reference and adverb placement. The difference between L1 and L2 groups trends towards significance for both gaze duration and total duration for comprehension accuracy in both conditions, suggesting L1 speakers may have higher comprehension accuracy than L2 speakers. Group membership was proved to be predictive of comprehension accuracy when investigating interaction between condition, eye-gaze measures, and comprehension measures. Finally, the interaction between total duration and condition is trending towards significance for response time to comprehension questions, indicating that as total duration increased for the temporal reference condition, response time also increased.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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