Costa, A. 1 , Falé, I. . 2, 1 & Luegi, P. . 1
1 Universidade de Lisboa, FLUL/CLUL
2 Universidade Aberta
In this study, we hypothesize that eye movements tracking simultaneous with reading aloud can reinforce evidences of behaviors markers of linguistic processing. In fact, reading aloud speech can reveal prosodic indicators of structure building, working as a window to access cognitive processes of information integration. Data from an experiment on reading aloud by 17 adult native speakers of European Portuguese was collected and analyzed. A passage with a technical issue was prepared at both lexical and syntactic levels. Eye movements were registered with an SMI IVIEW X? HI-SPEED system, and speech recorded with a Logitech® Webcam Pro 9000. Critical areas for analysis were delimited considering intonational and structural properties. First fixation, first pass and total fixation time, for eye movement?s analysis, and stressed vowel duration and F0, for prosodic analysis, were taken from the target word at the right edge of syntactic and prosodic selected unities. Results show that higher prosodic and syntactic boundaries - intonational phrases (IP) and complement phrases (CP) are marked by correlated behaviors from voice and eyes: F0 and total fixation time of target word. We can take these two variables as indicators of end-structure building of unities of high level and possibly of wrap-up effects.