Bilingual vs. Monolingual Readers: Insights from Eye-Tracking Data

Abstract

The present eye-tracking study examines silent and oral text reading by Russian-German bilinguals of two age groups (9-10 and 15-16 years) and compares it with their monolingual peers. The bilingual sample represents so-called heritage speakers of Russian who know both the Latin and the Cyrillic script. The paper relies on two global eye movement measures – the averaged total fixation count and the averaged total fixation duration per token – and analyses the effects of three factors: <em>language profile, age</em>, and <em>reading mode</em>. In both age groups, bilinguals made a higher number of fixations per token and fixated the token longer than their peers. This observation holds for both languages and reading modes. However, the gap between bilinguals and their peers was much larger in Russian, and interindividual variation was greater in Russian than in German. The better results in German can be explained by its status as the primary medium of instruction and its dominance in everyday literacy, but the prolonged information processing in both languages suggests the activation of both linguistic systems and their mental lexicon, even if only one language has been triggered by the task. Notably, general language command, more specifically, lexical knowledge and reading experience play a decisive role in reading acquisition and behaviour. These insights should be considered by the educational practice at school as well as by scientific research in multilingualism.