Reading Time Analysis

Purpose

This skill encodes expert methodological knowledge for analyzing eye-tracking data from reading experiments. A competent programmer without psycholinguistics training would likely compute a single "reading time" per word, missing the critical insight that different eye-tracking measures tap different stages of language processing. Choosing the wrong measure for your research question -- or failing to account for spillover effects, skipping patterns, and the distinction between first-pass and second-pass reading -- leads to misattribution of cognitive processes.

When to Use

Use this skill when:

• Analyzing eye-movement data from reading experiments (sentence or passage reading)
• Selecting which eye-tracking measures to report for a given linguistic manipulation
• Defining regions of interest and handling spillover effects
• Setting up statistical models for eye-tracking reading data
• Cleaning and filtering fixation data for reading analyses

Do not use this skill when:

• Analyzing self-paced reading data (see self-paced-reading-designer for that paradigm)