Abstract
With this study I wanted to see if eye-tracking could be used as an effective online measure of speech comprehension in the processing of sentences. Two experimental levels of syntactic complexity were used in this paradigm: subject relative embedded clauses and objective relative embedded clauses. English-speaking young adults listened to simple narrative sentences while looking at a visual display containing potential referents within the sentence and were asked to determine the agent of the action. The goal was to see if eye-gaze to the correct agent would signify the moment at which participants comprehended the sentences. This experiment was able to define a temporal window during which participants resolved syntactic ambiguity in real-time. The key behavioral finding showed that the probability of saccading to the target agent was considerably higher for subject-relative than object-relative sentences indicating a difference in sentence processing due to syntactic complexity.