Self-Paced Reading Task

The self-paced reading (SPR) task measures online sentence comprehension at the level of individual words or phrases. Each sentence is divided into regions. Participants press Space to reveal each region in turn — one region at a time, in the centre of the screen — and the time between consecutive keypresses is the reading time (RT) for that region.

This template implements the subject-relative vs. object-relative (SR/OR) clause manipulation, the most studied syntactic complexity contrast in SPR research. English speakers process SR sentences (e.g. The reporter who attacked the senator admitted the error) faster than structurally equivalent OR sentences (The reporter who the senator attacked admitted the error), because SR clauses follow the more frequent subject–verb–object template while OR clauses require a rare object–subject–verb order inside the relative clause.

The classic finding is a reading-time penalty at region 3 (the disambiguating verb/noun phrase) for OR compared to SR sentences, often spilling over to region 4. Following each sentence, a yes/no comprehension question checks engagement and measures understanding of thematic roles.

Note on the sentence set. The template ships with 2 practice sentences and 8 main sentences (4 SR + 4 OR). For published research, replace the sentence list with items from a normed stimulus set matched on word frequency, word length, and plausibility, following a Latin-square counterbalancing design so each participant sees each item in only one condition.