Transcripts

You will find below the transcripts for each episode.

Episode 1. Beyond the Classroom: Informal Language Learning

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
If you have a connection to languages, this is the podcast for you. Whether you’re a language learner, a language teacher, a language researcher, or anyone who’s interested in languages.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I’m Dr. Marie -Josee Bisson.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And I’m Dr. Kaitlyn Zavaleta.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
We are the language scientists and this is our podcast. Throughout this series, we hope to translate the science behind language learning into informative and practical advice. So sit back and enjoy. So we’re both lecturers in psychology at De Montford University, and we both do language learning research.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
We do. But this is something that we’re really just interested in as we are language learners ourselves.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
That’s right. I mean, I’m a native speaker, French, but I acquired English gradually over the years to hopefully become bilingual. But I also enjoyed learning German and Spanish.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And I’m a native English speaker who studied French over several years and kind of still use it and studied Spanish and other languages.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So we’re language geeks.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So, you are a native French speaker. Can you tell us a little bit about your language background?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yes, so. Well, I’m from a very monolingual French speaking family. I come from Canada originally, but the French speaking part of Canada, so the province of Quebec. And so everything in my life happened in French up to a certain age, but also because of where we are in Quebec, we are surrounded by English speakers and we get all the English TV channels, English music. So I gradually learned lots of English words. My dad, also, when we were growing up annoyingly, always wanted to watch films in the original soundtrack so that he played them in English and we hated it as children. But actually it did us the world of good. So we learned lots of English that way, but also in primary and secondary schools in Quebec, we learned English as a second language. So I had a little bit of kind of intentional learning there in the classroom as well. And so gradually I became bilingual. I also when I got to college, I got to choose whether I wanted to go to an English or French speaking college, and I chose an English speaking college. So then again, you know, there was an explosion of English learning there. All my classes were in English. I lived with English speakers. So that’s my history of learning English. But also I picked up German and Spanish throughout my development, I suppose. German I went in to do a student exchange with Germany. So I went to live with the family for three months in Germany. So I learned a lot of German that way. And in college, I studied German and Spanish as my degree.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So then how did you get into language learning research?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Well, that came a lot later. So after I did my college degree, I eventually not at first, but eventually decided to do an undergraduate degree in psychology. So, you know, learning more about generally all the different psychological theories and stuff like that. And then after that, I decided to move to the U.K. I met my husband and then he was British. So we decided to move to the UK. And when we arrived here, I needed to find a job, of course, and I didn’t know what to do, but I thought, Oh, I’m a native speaker, so maybe I could teach people French. And I looked it up and they had a great program at the time, the graduate teacher training program. So you literally worked in a school straightaway, kind of like an assistant teacher, and then gradually you started picking up classes and you started teaching and then you attended university once a week. So then I became a French teacher and I worked and I did that for about five years. So teaching French to primary school children and secondary school and at A-level. And after that, I wanted to do a little bit more. I enjoyed it, but I wanted to do a bit more. And I thought, Well, why not put psychology with the language learning? So they came together nicely. And so I decided to go back and do a Ph.D. and the overall theme of my Ph.D. was to facilitate language learning.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So facilitating language learning, what does that mean?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So I wanted well, I just wanted to make it easier for people to learn languages, basically, and the main thing that I was interested in was incidental learning. And. Well, this is the topic of today, isn’t it?

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Tada, you got there. So today you’re you’re telling us a bit more about incidental language learning. So what is incidental language learning then?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So incidental learning is, well, if I contrast it with explicit learning, that might help people understand. So explicit learning would be more like the language learning classroom situation, where the aim is very much to focus on the learning aspect, learning the words, learning the grammar rules, maybe rote memorisation. You know, you have a list of vocabulary with the word in French the word in English, And you try to remember the two together. So you very much focus on the learning.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So this is the conjugation tables in Latin memorising all of those.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Absolutely. So, a lot of memorising. So that’s explicit learning. Well sometimes people call it intentional learning as well, so they mean the same thing. But on the other hand, incidental learning is much more informal so there the aim is not on learning. So you might be playing a game, you might be doing a word search, you might be watching a film in a foreign language, you might be listening to a song, but because you are exposed to language, you can start picking up some new words or some new grammar or some syntax.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So does it still count as incidental language learning if you are saying, Well, I’m going to watch my favourite show in French to learn the language?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yes, I think so, because, I mean, even if you made that decision because you thought that might help you with learning the language as you’re watching the film, you’re not going to necessarily focus on memorising the words. You’re going to be focusing on enjoying the series or the show. And you know what’s happening in the image, what’s happening with the relationship, the characters, you know, you get very much engrossed into the actual film. But again, because you’re just being exposed to that language, you can soak up some new words.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And then as we saw, obviously we think about like taking a class in another language that’s that intentional language learning exposure. But in our everyday lives, do we have any other experience with learning other languages through just kind of being exposed to it?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Well, there’s lots of opportunities outside of the classroom, I think, like we said, which with the films and series, I mean, that’s that’s an obvious one, isn’t it? Because that’s really enjoyable and easy to do nowadays. So Netflix, you can change the language quite easily or you can have the subtitles on or off. You can even play with the language of the subtitles as well. So I would say, you know, if you’re a complete beginner in the language, you probably want to have your native language in the subtitles so you can understand what’s happening. But as you become more fluent, you could switch to the same language as the soundtrack so that you can then extract some of the words more easily. When they’re being spoken you can follow with the soundtrack, the soundtrack with the subtitles so to map it together, basically.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Right, almost like a sing along with.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Well, there we go. You could why not do karaoke in another language? That’s an excellent example. And because you’re following along with the words on screen that you’re saying, you know, you will definitely start picking things up. You might want to watch song clip videos. So YouTube’s a good place for that. So you might to watch a video clip of a song in French and then you can have the subtitles on the French subtitles, for example, so you can follow what’s being said. Songs are really good as well because they’re quite repetitive. The words come back and it’s quite catchy, so it might really stick in your head. So that’s another good example

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Hopefully, the right words.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, absolutely. If you have the chance to travel, obviously that’s a really good one for, you know, immersing yourself in not just the language but the culture as well which is really, really good. You’ll be bombarded then with words everywhere you look, you know, just road signs. And, you know, if you are walking around a museum, you might see some of the words that are in the descriptions. So there’s lots of opportunities for incidental learning outside of the classroom, but also inside the classroom. I think teachers should be willing to experiment with different activities, you know, sometimes just giving the students a game in that language so that they’re not focusing on learning words per say. They’re just enjoying playing the game. But again, because they’re using the words, they’ll just increase their knowledge.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So it sounds to me that with incidental language learning, it’s kind of advantageous to folks who are trying to learn a new language, but maybe they’re not the best at just memorisation. They don’t have to just rely on that.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, I think that’s a good point because, you know, sometimes I meet people and they ask me what I do for work. Now I’m a language learning researcher and they say language learning is so hard I can’t learn it. And I’m like, that’s so not true. Everybody can learn a language because we all learned our native languages, right? So and the way we learn our native language mostly is through incident learning. So it’s very informal. You know, nobody gives you lists of vocabulary. Well, not at first anyways, because you can’t read and write. So you just you listen to your parents speak, you try to extract words to try to extract information from this kind of continuous speech stream that’s happening around you. And eventually our brains are very good at picking out regularities, things that are repeating patterns. So you will start extracting things as a child. You do this, but as adults as well. You will if you’re exposed to enough language, you know. So children start to speak when they’re about two. So, you know, just two years of exposure, parents constantly talk to their children and sometimes in simplified language as well, which is helpful too, for the learner too. So we all go through this massive episode of incidental learning as children, because this is how we learn all native language so everybody can do incidental learning. The bit that some people find difficult is the explicit learning, I would say. So, you know, not everybody enjoys trying to memorise lists of vocabulary.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
What?! No?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Because well, it’s not enjoyable, is it. Unless you can, you want to learn the word because then you know, you’re going to go to the restaurant or to the grocery store and you need to be able to communicate there and then you’ll be really motivated to do it. But so if you know, if, if a language learning class is not really your thing, but you know, if you’ve, you’ve done French for five years at school and you took your GCSEs and you still think that, oh, no, I’m not really good at French. But you have a base already. So, then, what you want to do is just get exposed to the language and you’ll just pick things up.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah. No, you’re right, though. Even if you have that gap in having spoken the language, then when you drop back into that environment, suddenly you’re like, wait, I do have it. It’s there. I can, you know, soak up more.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, no, absolutely. So, even though you think you might have forgotten something completely, you know. You haven’t. It’s still there somewhere, and you just need to reactivate it. So, yeah, again,putting yourself into that environment or increasing your exposure to that language a little bit will just you’ll just kind of reactivate those words and you’ll, it’ll be faster when you want to relearn it compared to learning it for the first time anyway. So it’s not lost, not all is lost. Keep with it.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So how do you research this? I mean, you can’t just give people list and say, okay, so we’re going to study language learning, but don’t learn these words because we’re going to be sneaky about it.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, no, I know. So I normally don’t tell people straight away. I tell them at the end of the study what the study was really about, but at the beginning I am a bit vague about it. So I tell them normally that it’s about language processing. Just want to know how people process language. It’s not wrong. No, no, I said I’m not lying. It’s you know, that’s kind of true. And then I’ll ask them to do a task where. Well, again, I’m not being I’m not asking them to learn anything. But the task I use is really simple. It’s a letter search task. So I show them a letter. Then the computer screen changes and they see a word. And all they have to do is tell me whether the letter they saw was, in the word, yes or no. So it’s really, really simple. But at the same time as the written word is being presented, they also see a picture and they hear the foreign language word, although that’s kind of additional information that they don’t need for the task that they’re doing. But because they’re being exposed to the picture, they can start learning what the meaning of the words is and so through repeated exposure, through the whole study, then eventually people pick up some of these words. It’s it’s kind of the best task I could use for the lab situation. You know, best case scenario, it’d be great to investigate this in the wild.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
The Trueman Show.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I know. Basically, it would be great. But I mean, I need it to be super controlled so that I can really at the end of the study, I can conclude that the reason why they know these words is because I’ve exposed them to these words during this incident learning situation. But I like the idea of the multi modality. So the fact that there is information coming in visually with the written word, the picture and also some audio information, because I think you need that to reflect a little bit about what happens in real life. You know, you’ll hear something, you might see a written word. There might be an object or something on the table that, you know, people are talking about. So, you know, that’s kind of how the mapping happens in the wild. So I was trying to reflect that in the lab as much as I could.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Right, with constraining all the other factors.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Absolutely. Yeah.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So what is your personal favourite method of exposure or incidental learning?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
For me personally…

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
What would you do today?

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I know I’d travel to Spain to refresh my Spanish and then I would do a side trip to Germany to refresh some of that German that I have somewhere in my brain, but it’s a bit rusty. And of course, you know, that’s a bit tricky. But I mean, nowadays there’s just so much media available. So, you know, like you said, you could watch one of your series that you enjoy but switch the language of the subject to another language. I think with my children, we do this with cartoons a lot. So sometimes they ask me to watch TV and I’m like, okay, well, let’s watch it in French. So we change the soundtrack to French and we just watch it in that language. So with cartoons you don’t get the problem with lip synchronicity so much, so you can easily change the soundtrack. So maybe pick up a cartoon in that language.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah. Your favourite movie. Your favourite animated movie.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Absolutely.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So then what are the three things that you would like to maybe tell us about. That you would like us to walk away from this podcast episode with.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Okay. So one thing would be, I think for language teachers to not shy away from using the idea of incidental learning in the classroom. I think it’s really good to introduce students to all the different ways of learning language, and they would really enjoy probably more of a broader range of activities. Yes, you need the explicit grammar lessons and the the learning of vocabulary lists, but I think it would be really good to increase their exposure through maybe yeah, the idea of watching a cartoon in another language or doing some activities with songs or playing word games where they can kind of relax into just enjoying the activity. You know, there’s no pressure in learning anything. Just enjoy the activity, but they will pick up things. That’s the idea with incidental learning. And then it gives them ideas of what to do outside of the classroom to further their learning. One of the things I didn’t mention is that, you know, you can’t just learn a new language by going to a language class. You’re not going to get the level of fluency just by learning list of vocabulary. So we know from research that if you’re trying to understand authentic material in another language, for example, reading a newspaper and in the language you need to know approximately 60,000 words. So, I mean, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to learn the list of 60,000 words. You know by rote memorisation. So you might be able to learn two, 3000 words of the most frequent in the language in a language class. They would do that. They would teach you the most frequent words and a few more rare words that you might need. But then, if you want to know more, you’ll have to do some reading in that language if you can. If you’re fluent enough, there are some simplified reading books as well. They’re called Graded Readers. Some stories that have been simplified to only use the thousand most frequent words in that language so that beginners in a learners can can do that. So reading is a great way of increasing your exposure to that language and to picking up some new vocabulary. Well, we said films with subtitles today, series, songs, travelling to that country, anything really that can give you a little bit of exposure to the language outside of the classroom. Second one, I guess for people to take up these incidental learning activities and student exchanges are really good. Studying abroad are really good opportunities to really, to really increase your language knowledge. So I would say to go for those. And lastly, what would be number three? I think I have got just to two major ones, to be honest, on incidental learning to just do it, you know, just to grab all the opportunities that you have that you can do to increase your exposure to that language.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for chatting through incidental language learning,

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
because I think so many people think of language learning as something that you have to sit down and memorise and do the conjugation tables. I know I do.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And do to a certain extent I think that really helps, it is a really good start in that language. But it’s not enough. It’s not enough. It’s not everything. But it’s also all the other opportunities. I mean, like I said, most of my learning of English was not in the classroom, it was really outside of the classroom. So if you want to become fluent in another language, you really need the incidental exposure.

Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Thanks for joining us today, Marie. It’s been a pleasure to hear more about your research on incidental language learning. In our next podcast we will be talking specifically about eye tracking in language research with Professor Kathy Conklin. Now as we’re finishing this episode, I just want to remind you to take 5 minutes to go into our show notes and click on the link for our survey. The survey is going to tell us what you liked about this series and what you would like to hear about next. So thank you for listening and thank you to the British Academy for funding our podcast. I’m Dr. Kaitlyn Zavaleta.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And I’m Dr.Marie-Josee Bisson and you’ve been listening to the Language Scientists podcast.

Episode 2. Tracking Eye Movements Provides Insight into Language Knowledge

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
If you have a connection to languages, this is the podcast for you. Whether you’re a language learner, a language teacher, a language researcher, or anyone who’s interested in languages. I’m Dr. Marie-Josee Bisson and alongside Dr. Kaitlyn Zavaleta. We are the language scientists. This is our podcast. We are senior lecturers in psychology at De Montfort University, and we conduct research in the area of language learning. Throughout this series, we hope to translate the science behind language learning into informative and useful practical advice. So sit back and enjoy. Today we are joined by Dr. Kathy Conklin from the University of Nottingham, who will talk to us about eye tracking in language research. Welcome, Kathy.

Dr Kathy Conklin
Welcome. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Kathy is a professor at the University of Nottingham, but she did an undergraduate degree in English and French at the University of Buffalo, and her Ph.D. was there too. But this time in linguistics and cognitive science. I met Kathy when I did my Ph.D. at the University of Nottingham, and she became one of my PhD supervisors. I’m really excited to have you today. It’s a real treat. So before we jump into your topic, Kathy, which is eye tracking, I always ask people in this podcast. Tell us a little bit about their language background.

Dr Kathy Conklin
So I’m a native speaker of English or North American English, but in high school I did a study abroad year in France. So I lived with a French family. I went to a French lycee or high school. So I was completely immersed in the French culture and family and school life, and I actually learned French to a really high proficiency, although don’t ask me to speak French anymore.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And this is really interesting because the previous episode was on Incident Learning. So you just were bombarded by an incident learning situation, really and that’s how you acquired French. Amazing.

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yeah, absolutely. So it was a very immersive experience. And and absolutely, I learned French very incidentally.

Dr Kathy Conklin
So after coming back from France, I attended a bachelor’s and master’s that you said, as you said, at the university at Buffalo. And after completing those, I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Nepal. And Peace Corps is kind of like the volunteer service overseas. So the British VSO. And in the first year, I was in a very remote village that was a three day walk from the nearest town.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson

That sounds the most amazing experience. We want to hear all about it.

Dr Kathy Conklin

It was so I was kind of in the foothills of Mount Everest, but it took about six days to walk there over very steep mountains or foothills, as they call them, to get to to base camp. And while I was there for the first year, I taught English in this remote village. And the second year I was there, I worked in the capital at the Ministry of Education, helping them to develop their English education language program. Certainly in the first year I was very immersed in Nepali. There wasn’t another English speaker for three days in any direction. But I never really achieved high proficiency in in Nepali, even though much like the French context, I was immersed. I lived with a family. It’s not like there were apartments in the middle of nowhere. So I lived with family. I ate with them. I went and taught in schools, spoke with people in Nepali, but my Nepali never got beyond a really conversational level. And sort of anecdotally, I believe that it was because I never became a fluent reader in Nepali, so it’s written in Devanagari script and I never could read very well. And it was always at the level of sounding things out. And we know from research that reading is really important. It helps us build vocabulary, it helps help us get expose to more advanced grammatical structures, reinforces the grammar. And without that, I just never got to be very high level in Nepali. Which is, which is unfortunate. And that kind of as we’ll come to maybe later in the discussion, that kind of difference in my attainment was one of the drivers behind why I wanted to explore a second language acquisition, so why I could achieve high proficiency in one case and not in the other case, understanding why that might be. And now I am exposed to a lot of German. So my husband is German. We’re raising our son bilingually. So I speak English to our son. My husband only speaks German to him. So in the home I’m exposed to a lot of spoken German conversation. I hear German TV in the background. German radio, we go several times a year to Germany. So again, I’m kind of learning German through incidental exposure and my conversational or passive understanding of German is pretty good, but I can’t really say anything. And I haven’t tried reading German yet, and I know that if I want to become proficient in German, I’m going to need to put some effort into it. But again, I’m, I’ve been able to learn a fairly impressive amount of German not having known a single word in German beforehand, just through this incidental exposure.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
That’s amazing. And it is really similar to my experience as well of living in Germany with the family and having this immersive experience. Like you say, it’s it’s amazing what you can pick up, but there’s just been so much, amazingly interesting information that you’ve just given us there in your language background. And I feel like we could do a whole podcast exploring, you know, using you as a case study to, you know, learning all of these different languages. And what an amazing experience to live in Nepal and learn Nepali. They’re really, really interesting. But I also want to get into eye tracking research. How can we make the jump from this amazingly interesting language background to eye tracking research? I don’t know. You told us a little bit about why you were interested in language and becoming a language researcher, kind of based on your own personal experience. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that?

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yeah. So as I kind of alluded to, this difference in my proficiency in French and and Nepali really spurred me to want to understand how people learn languages and specifically a second language. And so when I came back from the Peace Corps, I decided that I needed to do a Ph.D. in second language acquisition research. And so I went to the university at Buffalo. And while I was there, I learned eye tracking. And this was really in some of the early days of more widespread eye tracking. So the equipment was very antiquated to what we have these days. So people’s heads needed to be completely fixed so that their their heads wouldn’t move and so their eyes would be stable. So we used to have to make dental impressions of people’s teeth before doing the experiment. So we’d make these dental impressions. We would screw this dental impression onto a fixed metal bar, and people would have to bite down on the bar so that their head was totally fixed. We would strap them into this and then we would painstakingly track their eye movements because they were just on this dental bar. They would often drool while they were doing this experiments. It was maybe a kind of form of torture. I’m not sure if it would get back.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Well, I’m assuming, you know, from an ethical point of view, that the volunteers knew what they were getting into. I’m sure it had been really well explained to them, but it’s amazing that they wanted to go through the experience. But sometimes it’s just really interesting as a participant to to take part in research that is so different or that involves a really new or interesting piece of equipment.

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yeah. So we, we had to entice them with payments to do this and then they did know what they were, what they were getting into beforehand. Some people did after a little bit say it was too uncomfortable and then they would drop out of the experiment. But yeah, so this was like kind of the pioneering early days of eye tracking. So that’s how I learned to do eye tracking. And then later the new equipment that’s come out is so much nicer and user friendly. So we still have a chin rest that people set their chins on and a forehead rest to kind of stabilise people’s heads so they don’t move around too much while they’re doing the language test. But it’s certainly moved on from what I learned in Buffalo.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
They don’t have to bite on anything and drool all over the equipment. That’s definitely an improvement. So tell us a bit more about eye tracking in language research because you actually wrote a book about this, didn’t you? You are like the actual amazing expert on eye tracking. I’m so happy that you decided to join us on this podcast.

Dr Kathy Conklin
Oh, good. Thank you. So, just in basic terms, eye tracking equipment provides a means of detecting where people’s eyes move when they look and then stop and land at certain points. And we call these fixations and in a lot of language research, we’re really interested in the fixation. So we want to see where your eyes stop and we measure how long you fixate at a particular position. And if you fixated a particular position, we know you’re spending more effort processing what’s at that position. So whatever you’re seeing is requiring more processing effort. It might be a complex image that requires more effort for you to decode, or it could be a word, and if you’re fixating it for a long time, it’s taking you more time to process that word. Either recognise it or kind of integrate it into the your ongoing understanding of whatever it is that you’re processing. So, so the larger discourse maybe be and conversely, if you’ve got shorter fixations, it means whatever you’re seeing is easier to process.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So our eyes don’t move fluidly when we read they made these little jumps.

Dr Kathy Conklin
Absolutely. So we make little jumps from one thing to another. One of the things in reading research we’re often interested in is you come to something and your eyes actually jump backwards. So you come to something, you don’t quite understand it. So your eyes may need to jump back in a text or a sentence to figure out ooh I don’t get it. This word doesn’t make sense, I think with what I just read. So you might go back and look at something else. We’re really interested, maybe where you go back to try and retrieve your understanding of what you’ve been processing, talking about this and explaining about fixations. There’s actually different kinds of eye tracking equipment and some eye tracking equipment offers more precision and accuracy. So when people are reading, I can tell precisely what word or even a set of a cluster of letters that they’re they’re looking at when they’re reading that a text or browsing the web on a web page or reading a language exam or engaging in some sort of TV viewing and subtitles. Or if I’m having someone watch TV, I can see if they’re looking at someone’s face. I can determine whether they’re looking at their eyes. Someone’s eyes or nose. Then there are other eye tracking systems that are less precise and less accurate. And in that case, I might be able to say, okay, I’m looking at one sort of set of words kind of that are near to each other on a page. But I don’t know precisely which one you’re looking at, or I know that you’re looking at someone’s face, but I don’t know if you’re focussed on their mouth, for example, or if it’s their eyes. So eye trackers really differ in how precise they are and how accurately and precisely we can pinpoint where you’re looking on a computer screen.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So some eye-tracking is better for particular research design, whereas a less precise one can do the job for something that you want to know, maybe a little bit less imprecisely. So, for example, if somebody’s looking to the left or the right of the screen, you know, if you could do that, that’s fine too for some design. But yeah, so if you want to go to the word level, really, you need the creme de la creme, the expensive equipment. Can we talk about how expensive this is?

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yes, absolutely. If we want the creme de la creme equipment, it is really expensive. It’s in the tens of thousands of pounds or tens of thousands of U.S. or Canadian dollars. It’s really expensive equipment. So if you want to get into eye tracking, either you have to have access to a lab who has the equipment and that will let you use it. Or often people will have some grant or funding money to buy buy the equipment for for a lab. And also this kind of equipment that allows for this precision is going to take up some physical space. So the system I use actually has two computers. One that the participant sits at and one that the experimenter sits at. There’s a little camera that sits, in our case near the screen, for some of the eye tracking systems it’s mounted on the screen. But you need space to put that in and that’s usually in a lab, although we can take our system to schools if we want to test school kids. But again, you’re going to need a physical location to put it in. Some of the less precise systems like Google glasses. They’re just these glasses with a camera embedded in them. You can obviously take them anywhere. You can track people’s eyes when they go to a grocery store. That’s not going to give you the precise location of where people are looking. I might know that they’re looking at this part of a shelf, but I don’t know if they’re looking at a particular item on a shelf or if they’re reading the label on the item. I can’t tell at all what exactly they’re reading. So there really is a big difference in the systems in terms of how precise and accurate at least we can pinpoint people’s fixations to what they’re looking at.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I’ve also seen recently some software that uses your computer camera to see where you’re looking on your screen. What do you think of those?

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yeah. So again, if you’re interested in whether people are looking at, you know, kind of a quadrant of the screen and those kinds of systems are usually fine. But if you want the precision to actually drill down, to look at the actual word that someone’s looking at, those systems aren’t quite good enough yet Probably in the next 5 to 10 years we’ll see that that’s that’s happening. So you’ll just have a little camera that you can put on a screen or embed in glasses and you’ll be able to to tell where people are looking, but we’re just not quite there yet. And in language research, we often are really interested in, you know, precisely where people are looking. So I want to know if you’re taking a language exam, which words you’re having trouble with, or if you’re watching a movie in your second language and you’re using the subtitles, which words are, you know, causing more effort where you might go in the image to help you figure out what the subtitles might mean? So we really want this precise information in language research. So hopefully the kind of thing that you’re talking about, just with a camera mounted on a screen or in glasses, will get more precise and accurate. But until then, it’s really not for language research. Most of us use these more expensive pieces of equipment.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So if anybody’s interested in conducting a study using eye tracking, then they’ll really have to get in touch with someone like Kathy, for example, who has the equipment and is willing to collaborate with people.

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yeah. Yeah. And we do collaborate with with people, you know, who want to get into eye tracking or have gotten a system and want help with it. So one of the things, these systems that take a little effort to learn, so you have to learn how to calibrate the camera so it tracks people’s eyes well. You have to learn the dedicated software that goes with it, both in terms of setting up an experiment and to export the data that you want. And doing this takes some time and and effort. So I think probably the best resources and you could probably speak of your experience as well, Marie, that one of the best resources are other people. So people who’ve done it before and can give you some tips and clues. But there also now are some some other resources. Like you mentioned, the book I wrote is is really intended to help people get started with eye tracking. There’s some other books that have also come out recently to help people. Some good introductory chapters and articles. But really, I think probably the best resource is having someone show you what to do and how to do it. And then you can kind of supplement with these these guides that might explain what it is you’re you’re actually doing.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, I definitely agree to that. I was very lucky to have Kathy on hand to show me how to use the eye tracker. But you’re right, it’s everything else that you need to learn around it. And thinking about your research design as well is really important and how you know which measures you can use and what they’re going to tell you, thinking about all that before you even start collecting data. And and then there’s the whole analysis bit, which we haven’t got into, but sometimes you get some imprecision in your data. There are ways around. It is always to fix it, but you need to spend a lot of time looking at everything. And yeah, no, I can talk from experience here that it is very time consuming but so interesting. Kathy just mentioned about films with subtitles. This was one of my first research studies when I did my PhD and we were looking at whether people read subtitles in different languages and it was really interesting to look at that with eye tracking. And yeah, we saw that people, even if the subtitles is in language that they didn’t have any prior knowledge of before, they would still exhibit regular reading behaviour. So that was really cool, a really cool study. Okay, so you’ve told us about generally speaking, you know how to use an eye tracker a little bit in terms of what measures you can look at. So fixations, saccade is the other thing. So that’s the jumps, that’s the name we use for the jumps between those fixations and then the regressions when people go back to a sentence or two were were that previously encountered and that can tell us a lot about how they processing information. And can you give us an example of one of your research projects in a bit more detail and kind of what you were interested in looking at and how the eye tracker was really the way forward to to give you information about that.

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yeah. So I’m really interested in formulaic language, which is kind of a fancy way of saying language patterns or word patterns. So these are things like idioms. So kick the bucket meaning to die or spill the beans meaning to reveal a secret. So I’ve done a lot of research with idioms, but I’ve also been interested in what are called binomial. And these are two words from the same part of speech. So now two nouns connected by a conjunction. So these are like fish and chips, salt and pepper, time and money. And I’m really interested in how people process these. So these are patterns that we encounter repeatedly. So I probably hear fish and chips several times a week. I hear people say it or I walk by a chip shop and see the word fish and chips. So how does my brain process these these kinds of language patterns that I encounter a lot? So one of the early studies I did with a PhD student back then who’s now gone on to a successful research career herself, was to look at how people process these binomial expressions. And it was also one of my first experiences using a more modern eye tracker that didn’t make you strap people in. So we I tracked people’s eye movements to these binomial expressions compared to the reverse form. So looked at how people read fish and chips in a sentence versus chips and fish or salt and pepper versus pepper and salt. Okay. And we tested in the lab people who are native speakers of English, as well as people who were non-native speakers of English. So people for whom English was their second language. And we found that people read the binomial. So these things that they encountered a lot in language significantly faster than the reversed form. So things that I encountered a lot, they’re really fast at reading. And this was true for the native speakers as well as the high proficiency non-native speakers. But the low proficiency non-native speakers didn’t show a difference between the two. And we kind of hypothesise that that’s because the the low proficiency speakers didn’t have enough exposure to this. They weren’t familiar with it. So there was no advantage to that. So more recently, that’s what I’ve set out to really test is the emergence of what we call this formulaic advance.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
How we learn those. I think they are really hard to learn for myself anyway, if I make a mistake when I’m when I’m speaking, it’s because I’m not using the right conjunction for example in between those two words or one, one of the word is fine, but the other is not. I’m using a synonym for the second word and it’s kind of interesting errors, I think. Yeah, carry on. Sorry.

Dr Kathy Conklin
I know, and those are the kind of things that really mark you out as a non-native speaker.

Dr Kathy Conklin
So you put things in the wrong order. You say chips and fish and you no one would be forgiven for thinking that the chips are more important to a lot of people than the fish and put the chips first. But so it really marks you mark someone out so you can, you know, chips and fish is perfectly grammatical. There’s nothing wrong with the utterance, but if you say it, it somehow marks your speech. Maybe you’re trying to, you know, emphasise something about the chips. But for non-native speakers it marks them as as not, you know, saying things kind of in the canonical way that that a native speaker would. So a lot of my research now has focused on this emergence of this advantage for non-native speakers. So we recently did a study where we made up a bunch of these binomial. So we wrote a story, different stories. One of them was about a couple who bought a new house that needed a lot of work. So it’s going to take a lot of time and money. And you know to fix it up. And we embedded these new binomial that we made up. So the wires and pipes in the house were awful. The wires and pipes were going to need to be replaced. The joiner had to come in and fix all the wires and pipes. So in these stories we had embedded repeated binomial wires and pipes that were made up people wouldn’t have encountered before. And we found within 4 to 5 times of encountering these in the story, people started to have this canonical processing advantage. So after seeing wires and pipes four times, then seeing pipes and wires to reverse form, there was a bit of a penalties about slow down reading it. We’ve recently collaborated with some people in Saudi Arabia to repeat this experiment with non-native speakers of English speakers who are native speakers of Arabic to try and see if we see the same sort of pattern emerge. And we do see some similarities so that you get kind of a processing advantage by reading wires and pipes a bunch of times in these stories, but you don’t get a disadvantage for the pipes and wires. So it looks like they’re starting to associate the two words in memory. So they’re fast seeing the two words, but they haven’t been able to learn that the order matters so that it’s wires and pipes, not pipes and wires. And that might speak to what you just said, that these words might become associated in your brain. You might know that the two words go together, but that what the order is might take more exposure. And maybe it’s just something that second language speakers aren’t as attuned to.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Really interesting. Yeah. So like you say, we learn to associate the two, but the order doesn’t stick. Oh, yeah, I can totally relate to that. I would be the one to say chips and fish. Absolutely.

Dr Kathy Conklin
Chips are more important, right.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
But it doesn’t sound wrong to me you know? So I think this is why sometimes I notice that I’ve said the wrong thing or I’m like, hang on, is this the way to say it? And I’d actually ask people and they’d be like, no, no, it’s it’s fish and chips. So it’s like, it doesn’t sound wrong to me. But I wondered about that if there was a difference between the the spoken form and the written form because all you study is obviously using eye tracking. You’re looking at the written form and how quickly people are learning get if they’ve seen it in writing. Do you think there’s a difference if they are just hearing these as opposed to seeing those? Are we kind of faster at learning it in writing?

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yeah. So that’s a really a really interesting question. And the student I mentioned for the first study, the Ph.D. student, she’s continued to work on formulaic language as as well. And one of the things she’s worked on more is the spoken language. So if we encounter these in spoken language, do we get the same sort of processing advantage? And it seems like that that that that is the case.
But in general, more of our research involves reading simply because we can use tools like eye tracking. But if we use spoken research experiments that are much more difficult and challenging,
so you just see a lot less of it and we understand a lot less about processing of spoken language. And the experiments tend to be less natural. So yeah, eye tracking allows us just to present things on the screen as we normally would. So you can just watch a movie. We don’t have to ask you to do any sort of other task, like making judgements. Where as a lot of the experiments involving spoken material usually involve some sort of decision component. So you hear something, you have to make a decision about it and we can measure your accuracy, your response times. So we just have a lot less, less research on spoken language and also production when people produce language. So I might hope that you produced the binomials when I talk to you, but you know, you might never say a binomial an entire conversation. So then I don’t have any data to work with. So our understanding of spoken comprehension and production is much less just because it’s harder to design experiments that are that are natural.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
No, I understand. Yeah. And, and from, from what you said as well earlier, you know, the importance of the written input when we learn another language and how that gives us a big boost in terms of our learning. So I think it’s really interesting to look at the written the written stuff. And a couple of extra questions I had about eye tracking in reading because well, I’m assuming that our listeners are potentially not familiar with what is expected in reading. And can you tell us a little bit about the nitty gritty of, you know, when we read and we fixate on certain words? So I know there’s a lot of words that we we tend to skip or we see a few letters one way and more the other way. Can you just go through that?

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yeah. So that so that’s true. So when we read, we actually fixate probably only around 70% of the word. So we skip about 30%, meaning our eye does not land on about 30% of the words. And that has to do with kind of the second part of your question. So when my eyes fixates on a word, I can actually see a few words or letters to the for readers of English, Spanish, French, where reading is from left to right. We can actually see quite a few characters forward ahead in our reading to the right. So if I fixate the word dog, I can actually see the next few words. So that means I don’t need to fix them. I’m able to decode and tell what they are with, without overtly my eyes landing on them. Interestingly, for speakers of languages like Arabic that are written from right to left, it’s the opposite. So when they land on on a word, their eyes can fixate. And when they land on a word and fixated, they can actually see the upcoming words to the left hand side. So if they land on dog, they can see words that are coming after it to the left. So they don’t need to then fixate those, especially if words are short. So things like a, the, and we see that those kinds of function words don’t get fixated a lot. So we tend to focus more on the content words which are actually the longer words. And then we can usually get a little bit of what we call preview of the upcoming words and then we don’t need to to fixate them.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
It’s amazing, isn’t it, when you start to look at it in such detail. What do you want people to remember from this podcast on eye tracking in Language Research?

Dr Kathy Conklin
Yeah, so eye tracking has been a really transformative tool in language research, so it has allowed us to present people with language in a very natural way. So you can just look at anything visual on the screen and we can see where you look and see how much effort you’re expending to look at visual objects, language that is presented on the screen. And we don’t have to ask you to do unnatural tasks. We also don’t no longer have to, you know, have a dental impression and, you know, fasten you to the to a a big pole. So it is these days really a natural sort of experience. You know, we read from a computer is all the time we read books off of iPads. So it’s really a transformative tool that has allowed us to look at language processing in a very naturalistic way. But as we’ve mentioned in the podcast, the equipment is really expensive if you want this high precision equipment. And it’s going to take time to learn. Prepare yourself for that if you want to get into eye tracking. So find a lab that has the equipment and find people who are willing to work with you because they are going to be your best resources and learning how to use the equipment, calibrate it, set it up, learn the software. They can also help you with the data that comes out of it that can be quite complex and they can help you maybe with some of the analysis and statistics. And also these days there are some nice guides. So you mentioned the book and there are other books and, and chapters and, and articles that are really helpful. So I guess be prepared for the effort and look for good people to work with because that will make the the efforts really worthwhile and fruitful.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Thank you so much, Kathy. Thanks for joining us today. It’s been a pleasure to have you. And thank you for all the really interesting information you’ve told us about eye tracking.

Dr Kathy Conklin
Thanks so much for having me. It’s been really nice talking to you.

Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
In the next podcast, we are going to be expanding on this because we’ll be talking specifically about learning vocabulary through reading with Dr. Ana Pellicer-Sanchez. I just want to remind you to take 5 minutes to go into our show notes and click on the link for our survey. The survey will tell us what you’d liked about the series and what you would like to hear about next. Thank you for listening and thank you to the British Academy for funding our podcast. I’m Dr. Marie-Josee Bisson, and you’ve been listening to the Language Scientists podcast.