Eye Movement Correlates of Foreign Language Proficiency in Russian Learners of English

Abstract

Today, the modeling of various aspects of speech activity is the mainstream of modern cognitive and computational science. Along with models of natural language processing, much attention is paid to finding mechanisms of the several languages functioning within one cognitive system (bilingual, trilingual, etc.). The search for specific features of the processing of linguistic information by one subject in different languages allows one to approach the construction of bilingual models. This article is devoted to the analysis of the eye movements during text reading by bilinguals in their native and foreign languages, with different levels of proficiency in the latter. The present study tests the assumption that eye movement features of people with a high level of foreign language skills are similar during text reading in native and foreign languages. Another goal is to elicit features that provide the differentiation between the elementary and the intermediate levels of English language proficiency. We offer new Eye Tracking based evaluation metrics for the level of language proficiency.