Effect of Task Demands on Relationship between Eye Movements and Sentence Complexity

Eye movements were recorded while 8 Ss scanned self-embedded or right-branching sentences. On half the trials, Ss were forewarned that questions would follow sentence presentation. There were significantly more eye movements for the self-embedded than for the right-branching sentences, and this difference was much greater in the question condition than the non-question condition. The importance of task demands for scanning behavior was discussed.