Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigates the effectiveness of 'mouse tracking for reading' (MoTR), a novel incremental processing paradigm developed by Wilcox et al. (2024). MoTR adapts the eye-tracking procedure for online implementation. The present experiment is a replication of Mertzen et al.'s (2023) English-language eye-tracking task. Compared to Wilcox et al.'s original study, this work replicated not just syntactic but also semantic effects on reading, tested longer and more complex sentences, and directly compared the behaviour of trackpad and regular mouse users. Evidence of semantic interference was observed, with limited evidence of syntactic interference. The replication of these results adds to the evidence that MoTR can usefully supplement or even replace eye tracking.