This three-year project conducted by the research groups of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso and the Heidelberg University aims to integrate their main research areas by combining the methodologies of corpus linguistics and experimental linguistics. The goal is not only to promote linguistic research but also to create a platform for scientific exchange between the two countries.

The eye tracking technology is used to prove the hypothesis that discourse markers are linguistic elements which guide the processing of information and reduce the cognitive effort during that process. To do so we collect data about the reading behavior under controlled conditions while participants read texts of different typologies in L1 and L2. More precisely our aim is to prove that some discourse markers fulfill an essential role in the processing of specific language texts (L1 and L2).