Project Temporal Cues in Event Recognition and Prediction: A Web-Based Eye-Tracking Study Program Margo Katherine Wilke Undergraduate Research Internship Program Term Spring 2025 Status Accepted Research Area psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, eye-tracking, language processing Description This study aims to investigate how intermediate and advanced learners of Mandarin Chinese use temporal information to recognize or predict events during sentence comprehension. Temporal information in a sentence helps listeners infer what kind of event is being described. For example, imagine hearing the sentence, “The boy will kick the ball.” The word “will” indicates that the action hasn’t happened yet. Based on this, you’d focus on an image of the boy preparing to kick the ball, rather than one where the ball is already in motion. Understanding how second language (L2) learners interpret such temporal cues is important because their strategies may differ from native speakers. By studying this, we can gain deeper insights into the challenges they face and how they understand sentences in real-time communication. Using a web-based eye-tracking experiment, we will analyze where participants focus their gaze while listening to sentences and viewing images. This method provides valuable insights into the time-course of sentence comprehension. Supervisor Elaine J Francis Mentor Jingying Hu Type of work required The intern’s main responsibilities will include recruiting participants, scheduling their sessions, and guiding them through the experiment in the lab to ensure they complete the study smoothly. The mentor will handle the experiment setup.

As part of this role, you will gain insight into how to design and run a web-based eye-tracking experiment—an innovative method in language and cognitive science research. You will also learn how to summarize and interpret the behavioral data from the experiment (accuracy and response time), and you will have the chance to present your work at the spring undergraduate research conference.
Websites https://cla.purdue.edu/english/francislab/ Qualifications The intern should have some background in linguistics (at least one previous course). Knowledge of Mandarin Chinese is helpful, but not required. Specific knowledge of the experiment procedures and data analysis is not needed in advance and will be trained. Credit Hours 2 Weekly Hours 6 (estimated)