Experimental Psychology Society in 2010, the only Scottish psychologist to receive this recognition. In 2011 a Special Issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology was dedicated to Kennedy’s contribution to psychological research. A Symposium devoted to Kennedy’s work formed part of the 11th European Conference on Eye Movements held in Marseille, August 2011. Family He has married twice, first to Edwardene Mildred Price, leading to a divorce in 1976; and then to Elizabeth Wanda Sokolowska. He has one child by his first wife, the writer and journalist A L Kennedy. Research contribution Early work on the psychological reality of linguistic rules. Kennedy's early research (much of it in collaboration with A. L. Wilkes) was concerned with the "psychological reality" of linguistic competence, a preoccupation of cognitive psychologists in the 1970s. This work made use of simple laboratory tasks involving pressing buttons to indicate whether sentence fragments were grammatical or not, or to signal the presence of a particular word in a sentence. Eye movement control and reading In 1972, Kennedy spent six months in Paris, coming into contact with members of "Groupe Regard", an informal network of researchers working on psychological issues relating to eye movement control and led by Arianne Levy-Schoen. On his return to Dundee, Kennedy set up an eye movement laboratory aiming to replace indirect measurement of reaction time with more direct measurements of eye movements as participants read text. Initially, the principal UK funding agency (the Social Science Research Council) saw no future in work on eye movement control and refused to fund it. The validity of the approach was eventually accepted following a series of highly influential publications from laboratories in the USA (in particular, work by Keith Rayner and colleagues. In 1979 Kennedy secured funding and a series of papers in collaboration with Wayne S. Murray confirmed that both the duration and location of eye fixations were controlled by linguistic properties of the text being read. Spatial coding The psychological community rapidly established a consensus view that when a reader made an incorrect syntactic attachment (or was induced to do so by some experimental manipulation), this led to the deployment of corrective eye movements, involving looking back at the point in the text where the defective attachment had been made. In 1981, at a Sloan Conference in Amherst, Kennedy pointed out that although this equivalence between re-inspection and syntactic correction seems plausible, it