Language Processing Lab at NTNU

In the Language Acquisition and Language Processing Lab at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway professor Mila Vulchanova and her colleagues at the Department of Modern Languages are investigating language skills in children and adults. Most of their research is in the area of (psycho-)linguistics as well as cognitive science. Some studies involve adults; others are developmental studies involving infants.

Tobii Eye Trackers are used for research on the apprehension and categorization of motion (patterns) and spatial representation and its connection to spatial language.

Eye tracking gives professor Vulchanova and her colleagues the opportunity to study quite young children that do not yet talk and still are developing motor and other skills. Eye tracking is an interesting way to find out what such children already understand from the language they hear around them or from situations presented to them visually by analysing what they look at.

In the general case of perceptual-spatial studies, eye-tracking allows the team to combine information on where subjects look with other information, such as categorization and rating. Does the looking pattern of subjects watching motion sequences say something about how they subsequently categorise the motion? Is the spatial representation underlying spatial language also reflected in looking behaviour?

The research is part of an international project entitled Spatial categorization and language across populations, a NordForsk Infrastructure research project involving 12 participating labs from Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and North-Western Russia, where the lab at NTNU is the leading partner.

Professor Vulchanova explains why they have chosen an eye tracker from Tobii:
“-Tobii eye trackers are a new generation of "user-friendly" equipment which is easy to use, and completely non-invasive.”

Back to Psycholinguistics and reading research.