Testing Bayesian Pragmatics: Combining Eye Tracking and EEG

Team: Markus Werning (BayesPrag@, Bochum), Richard Breheny (University College London) and Matthias Unterhuber (BayesPrag@, Bochum)

The short term collaboration project will pertain to our project “The Interaction of Bayesian Pragmatics and Lexical Semantics in Linguistic Interpretation: Using Event-related Potentials to Investigate Hearers’ Probabilistic Predictions (BayesPrag@EEG)”. The main aim of the collaboration with Richard Breheny is to (1) extend our Bayesian model and our paradigm to eye tracking methodology and (2) explore the possibility of testing the model with eye tracking experiments, in addition to parallel EEG experiments conducted within the SPP project. The results of the short term collaboration project promises to be a major step forward for our project, since the collaboration allows us to integrate, in our Bayesian model, a second measure of conditional probability of a word given a preceding context – in addition to its negative correlation to the amplitude of its N400 component in EEG.