Self-Paced Reading

The self-paced reading (SPR) method was invented by psycholinguists in the 1970s (Aaronson & Scarborough, 1976; Mitchell & Green, 1978). SPR is so simple in design that it would be easy to assume today that it predates modern eye-tracking’s appearance in reading research, but in reality the two methods in their more primitive forms appeared at around the same time, when a newfound access to computers fostered some of the most significant advances in mental chronometry since its development just over a century prior (Donders, 1868/1969, as cited in Baayen & Milin, 2010). These game-changing developments in methods for psycholinguistic research arose out of a desire in cognitive psychology to measure language comprehension processes in real time and with “tasks that are as similar as possible to normal reading” (Mitchell & Green, 1978, p. 610). Self-paced reading was the simplest way to meet these goals using modern technology and for this reason it flourished in popularity and has persisted over time-unlike many of its predecessors, including click migration (Fodor & Bever, 1965), the phoneme-monitoring task (Foss, 1970), and the sentence classification task (Forster & Olbrei, 1973). Nearly forty years after its development, SPR is still the most fundamental experimental measure employed by psycholinguists interested in processing at or above the level of the sentence. SPR was also the first on-line (i.e., real-time) method to be applied in non-native sentence processing research.