Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty
© 2019 Elsevier Inc. Behavioral measures of incremental language comprehension difficulty form a crucial part of the empirical basis of psycholinguistics. The two most common methods for obtaining these measures have significant limitations: eye tracking studies are resource-intensive, and self-pace...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Elsevier BV
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/138282 |
| _version_ | 1826192622310391808 |
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| author | Boyce, Veronica Futrell, Richard Levy, Roger P |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Boyce, Veronica Futrell, Richard Levy, Roger P |
| author_sort | Boyce, Veronica |
| collection | MIT |
| description | © 2019 Elsevier Inc. Behavioral measures of incremental language comprehension difficulty form a crucial part of the empirical basis of psycholinguistics. The two most common methods for obtaining these measures have significant limitations: eye tracking studies are resource-intensive, and self-paced reading can yield noisy data with poor localization. These limitations are even more severe for web-based crowdsourcing studies, where eye tracking is infeasible and self-paced reading is vulnerable to inattentive participants. Here we make a case for broader adoption of the Maze task, involving sequential forced choice between each successive word in a sentence and a contextually inappropriate distractor. We leverage natural language processing technology to automate the most researcher-laborious part of Maze – generating distractor materials – and show that the resulting A(uto)-Maze method has dramatically superior statistical power and localization for well-established syntactic ambiguity resolution phenomena. We make our code freely available online for widespread adoption of A-maze by the psycholinguistics community. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:25:45Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/138282 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T09:25:45Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | Elsevier BV |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1382822023-03-30T18:57:13Z Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty Boyce, Veronica Futrell, Richard Levy, Roger P Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences © 2019 Elsevier Inc. Behavioral measures of incremental language comprehension difficulty form a crucial part of the empirical basis of psycholinguistics. The two most common methods for obtaining these measures have significant limitations: eye tracking studies are resource-intensive, and self-paced reading can yield noisy data with poor localization. These limitations are even more severe for web-based crowdsourcing studies, where eye tracking is infeasible and self-paced reading is vulnerable to inattentive participants. Here we make a case for broader adoption of the Maze task, involving sequential forced choice between each successive word in a sentence and a contextually inappropriate distractor. We leverage natural language processing technology to automate the most researcher-laborious part of Maze – generating distractor materials – and show that the resulting A(uto)-Maze method has dramatically superior statistical power and localization for well-established syntactic ambiguity resolution phenomena. We make our code freely available online for widespread adoption of A-maze by the psycholinguistics community. 2021-12-01T17:55:16Z 2021-12-01T17:55:16Z 2020 2021-12-01T17:52:35Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/138282 Boyce, Veronica, Futrell, Richard and Levy, Roger P. 2020. "Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty." Journal of Memory and Language, 111. en 10.1016/J.JML.2019.104082 Journal of Memory and Language Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ application/pdf Elsevier BV Other repository |
| spellingShingle | Boyce, Veronica Futrell, Richard Levy, Roger P Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty |
| title | Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty |
| title_full | Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty |
| title_fullStr | Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty |
| title_full_unstemmed | Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty |
| title_short | Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty |
| title_sort | maze made easy better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/138282 |
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