Eye-Tracking as a Powerful Tool for Investigating Language Processing in Messages

Every day, people encounter numerous messages whose language is conveyed via text. In this chapter, we present eye-tracking as a method for understanding how people process textual information. This chapter begins with an overview of eye-movement measures and their interpretations, followed by discussion of the relative advantages of eye-tracking compared to self-reports and readability formulas and an example of how eye-tracking data can be used to make generalizable predictions about real-world behaviors. Additionally, reliability and validity of eye-tracking technology is reviewed. In doing so, we argue that eye-tracking is a powerful tool for communication scholars to better understand attention, memory, comprehension, biases, and decision-making processes affected by language.