Salvatore Attardo & Lucy Pickering: Eye tracking in Linguistics. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023, 304 pp.
Eye tracking is a widely used sensor technology that researchers from various fields apply and refer to in their academic work.Although it may sound familiar to linguists, explaining its origin and application or building research based on eye tracking might seem inaccessible or intimidating.Initially, eye tracking might appear too complicated technically and methodologically to consider as a research method.This is the motivation behind Attardo and Pickering's recently published textbook: to provide a synthetic roadmap for beginners without advanced psychological, statistical, or biological knowledge.The authors aim to describe the "lay of the land" for newcomers.During their six years of lecturing on eye tracking to undergraduate and graduate students at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, they felt the need for a comprehensive introduction.With this book, anyone can easily navigate through the basics of eye tracking, its history, achievements and applications.The book is divided into three parts.Part One provides a general overview of the historical development of eye tracking, the anatomy and physiology of the eye, and the visual system.It concludes by introducing the terminology and underlying principles of eye tracking.Part Two outlines the application of eye tracking in studying reading, the visual world paradigm, social interactions, classroom attention, and other areas.The final, Part Three, details the methodological setup for eye tracking research, including planning and statistical analysis.The authors equip the readers with the necessary resources, mentioning comprehensive expert books for well-researched fields and listing all available sources for novice subjects.In the Introduction, Attardo and Pickering identify the reasons for the recent boom in eye tracking research, reflected by exponential growth in Google Ngram since 2000.This rise is due to technological advancements that make eye tracking almost invisible, allowing for natural observation.The evolution of computers has made data collection and pre-processing halfautomated, simplifying the researcher's role in setting up variables, running experiments, and interpreting results.Affordable prices have also fostered widespread application, enabling interaction research with data comparison and analysis from multiple devices and subjects.Part One provides a historical overview of vision studies, reflecting interest from the early 1800s.It begins with the Troxler effect, the fading of the peripheral view if no eye movement occurs.Introspective methods such as afterimages helped establish the extent of eye movement.
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