University of Arizona Psycholinguistics Laboratory

 

The MAZE Task

 

The purpose of the MAZE task is to provide an alternative to the standard word-by-word self-paced reading paradigms.

The problem with these tasks is that the reader may advance to the next display without having fully integrated the current material with the preceding context.

Since the object of these tasks is to provide an on-line measure of processing difficulty at each point of the sentence, this feature is undesirable. (The same can be said for eye-movement paradigms).

The object of the MAZE task is to force incremental integration of each new word with the preceding context. This is admittedly a rather unnatural situation, but we feel that it nevertheless provides a more accurate picture of the complexity of the integration process.

 

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