Self-Paced Reading Designer

This skill encodes expert knowledge for designing self-paced reading (SPR) experiments in psycholinguistics. SPR is the most widely used behavioral method for studying real-time sentence comprehension during reading (Jegerski, 2014). A competent programmer without psycholinguistics training will reliably make errors in region segmentation, spillover design, and comprehension question construction -- all of which invalidate the resulting data.

For detailed region segmentation strategies, see references/region-segmentation.md. For statistical analysis guidance, see references/analysis-guide.md.

Why SPR Design Requires Domain Expertise

Self-paced reading appears deceptively simple: participants press a button to reveal successive words. But the scientific value of an SPR experiment depends entirely on decisions that require psycholinguistic training:

1. Region boundaries determine what you can measure. A critical region that spans a clause boundary conflates syntactic processing with wrap-up effects (Just & Carpenter, 1980). A non-specialist would not know this.
2. Spillover is not a bug -- it is the primary data pattern. In SPR, processing difficulty at word N often appears in reading times at words N+1 and N+2, not at word N itself (Mitchell, 2004; Rayner, 1998). Failing to include and analyze spillover regions means missing the effect entirely.
3. Comprehension questions that target the critical manipulation create demand characteristics. Participants learn to attend strategically to the manipulation, distorting natural reading patterns (Jegerski, 2014).
4. Word length and frequency confounds are invisible to non-specialists. If the critical word in condition A is longer or less frequent than in condition B, reading time differences reflect lexical properties, not the intended manipulation (Keating & Jegerski, 2015).