Tanenhaus's research focuses on processes which underlie real-time spoken language and reading comprehension.

Tanenhaus obtained his Bachelor of Science from the University of Iowa in speech pathology and audiology after a brief stint at Antioch College.

He continues to be an involved researcher and faculty member who teaches courses on language processing and advises students.

"While Tanenhaus was not the first to notice the connection between eye movements and attention, he and his team were the first to systematically record how the technology could be used to analyze language comprehension," notes Hauser (2004, p. 2).

The apparatus tracks pupil and corneal reflections, and once calibrated, can accurately tell researchers where someone wearing the device is looking.

Tanenhaus wanted to investigate whether comprehension of language is informationally encapsulated or modular, as thought by many theorists and researchers including Jerry Fodor.

Tanenhaus used eye-tracking software and hardware to record the movement of the subjects' eyes as they listened to phrases and manipulated objects in a scene.

Actions and Affordances in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution Using a similar task to the previous study, Tanenhaus took this next method one step farther by not only monitoring eye movements, but also looking at properties of the candidates within the scenes.

His first book “Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Perspective from Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology, and Artificial Intelligence” was published in 1988.

This book was published to show the importance of looking at both social and cognitive aspects when studying language processing.