Reading fluency in mono- and multilinguals: Is there an additive effect of the number of languages spoken?

Abstract

Reading is an adequate measure of fluency since it eliminates the use of memory (Pasquarella et al., 2014). Experimental data with lexical access tasks shows reduced fluency in bilinguals compared to monolinguals (Ouzia and Folke, 2016; Sandoval et al., 2010). However, bilinguals also displayed cognitive advantages compared to monolinguals (Bialystok et al., 2012; Spinu et al., 2018, 2020), but these findings are disputed (Marzecova, 2016). The main research aims for this study are to determine whether (1) being a bi- or multilingual is associated with reduced reading fluency and (2) there is an additive effect of the number of languages spoken on reading fluency. Audio recordings of a short English paragraph were collected from 147 undergraduate students of diverse linguistic backgrounds (i.e., monolinguals, bilinguals, and trilinguals). The recordings are currently being analyzed manually for disfluencies such as hesitations, repetitions, mispronunciations / self-corrections, reading speed, and filled pauses (e.g., ‘er', ‘um', ‘ah', ‘like'). A final fluency score will be computed for each participant in order to evaluate our research questions. Our study thus expands bilingual fluency research to a reading task, adding to the body of work on multilingual cognition and the controversial phenomenon known as the bilingual advantage.