Exploring eye-tracking analyses of EFL learners’ cognitive processing of reduced relative clause

Eye-tracking technique is regarded as a reliable sensitive measurement to detect the regulation of eye movements, from which the objective visual data could be detected to explain invisible cognitive behavior. This paper employed eye-tracking sensors to examine how learners process reduced relative clause (RRC) sentences. The current research recruited 60 college students from a Chinese university to read three different types of RRC exemplars: left-branching, center-embodied and right-branching, and the sentences of each type were inserted frequent and/or infrequent verbs. The eye trackers were utilized to capture their eyes movements, and the instant visual data including fixation duration, fixation count as well as the scanning path were collected, compared and analysed. The results indicated that learners had the highest cognitive load when processing the center-embedded type of RRC, followed by the right-branching type and the left-branching type. Additionally, when the participant’s cognitive load is at a high level, the influence of verb frequency tends to be diminished. Besides, the results also revealed that the focus on the key areas, such as the conjunction, played a critical role in sentence processing. Furthermore, there leave several valuable practical and theoretical implications for further research. Firstly, eye-tracking technology is an adaptability for the measurement of mental process, which provide visualized evaluation of human–computer interaction. Secondly, the cognitive load theory could be extended and further studied though biofeedback data in the future.