Self-Paced Reading Task

The self-paced reading task — Just, Carpenter, and Woolley's moving-window paradigm — measures sentence comprehension as it unfolds. Participants read a sentence one word (or phrase) at a time, pressing a button to reveal each segment and hide the previous one, and the software logs how long each segment stays on screen. Those per-region reading times index processing difficulty: when the parser stumbles — at a garden-path disambiguation, an unexpected word, or a long-distance dependency — reading slows, and the slowdown localizes the difficulty to a specific region of the sentence. It is one of the simplest and most widely used online measures in psycholinguistics.