Uses of Eye-Tracking Data in Second Language Sentence Processing Research

Second language (L2) acquisition has been studied using a variety of techniques. Syntacticians have relied on introspective intuitions—from binary to gradient grammaticality judgments—as the main source of evidence for their theorizing (e.g., Montrul & Bruhn de Garavito, 1999; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; Sorace, 1993;White, 2003). Sociolinguists have employed survey data, sociolinguistic interviews, questionnaires, and other methods typically used in field work as data collection techniques to study the impact of social context on learner language and L2 acquisition (e.g., Bayley & Preston, 2008; Tarone, 2007).