These measurements often have low signal-to-noise ratio, and many methods require bringing participants into the lab and often require cumbersome equipment.
Due to incrementality, these differential processing demands are, by and large, met relatively quickly by the mind once they are presented, and they can be measured in both brain ( Kutas & Hillyard, 1980 Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992) and behavioral ( Mitchell, 2004 Rayner, 1998) responses. Differential and localized processing difficulty means that different inputs in context present different processing demands during comprehension ( Levy, 2008). Incrementality in comprehension means that our minds do not wait for large stretches of linguistic input to accrue rather, we eagerly analyze each moment of input and rapidly integrate it into context ( Marslen-Wilson, 1975). Two chief results of human language processing research are that comprehension is highly incremental and that comprehension difficulty is differential and localized.
Overall, we expanded the scope of experimental materials, and thus theoretical questions, that can be studied with the Maze task. This superior localization is an advantage of Maze compared with other methods. Crucially, Maze reaction times show a tight relationship with properties of the current word, with little spillover of effects from previous words.
Moreover, the Maze task yielded useable reaction time data with word predictability effects that were linearly related to surprisal, the same pattern found with other incremental methods. Participants were able to comprehend these longer text passages that they read via the Maze task. We adapted A-maze for use on longer passages and tested it on the Natural Stories corpus. A-maze is a recent method for measuring incremental sentence processing that can localize slowdowns related to syntactic ambiguities in individual sentences.
Behavioral measures of word-by-word reading time provide experimental evidence to test theories of language processing.
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