I am a Master's student in psycholinguistics and I am currently writing my thesis to explore the effects of the social context on language comprehension during reading. While I am aware that the moving window paradigm is preferred because it resembles best the results achieved in eye-tracking studies, I was wondering what the current perspective is on cumulative self-paced reading.
After spending time searching for literature on the cumulative method, I found some mentions that report on the performance of the cumulative method, but they do not seem very optimistic when it comes to the success of this method, when applied to on-line parsing (Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; Just, et al. 1982).
To me, it seems like cumulative SPR might be more suitable for online experiments (in my mind it may be able to compensate for the fact that participants' attention is weaker due to the weaker experimental control (participants are at home in front of their own PCs, not in a lab); maybe participants would be able to recall the input better when faced with the cumulative paradigm vs. the non-cumulative one)
I am of course still searching for literature on this, but I would be very grateful for your suggestions. I would also be grateful if you could share any research experience on this.
References
Ferreira, F., & Henderson, J. M. (1990). Use of verb information in syntactic parsing: Evidence from eye movements and word-by-word self-paced reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16(4), 555–568. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.16.4.555
Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A., & Woolley, J. D. (1982). Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 111(2), 228–238. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.111.2.228
