Second-language experience modulates eye movements during first- and second-language sentence reading: evidence from a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm.

Abstract

Eye movement measures demonstrate differences in first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph-level reading as a function of individual differences in current L2 exposure among bilinguals (Whitford & Titone, 2012). Specifically, as current L2 exposure increases, the ease of L2 word processing increases, but the ease of L1 word processing decreases. Here, we investigate whether current L2 exposure also relates to more general aspects of reading performance, including global eye movement measures and how bilinguals use parafoveal information to the right of fixation during L1 and L2 sentence-level reading, through use of a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). We found that bilinguals with high versus low current L2 exposure exhibited increased L2 reading fluency (faster reading rates, shorter forward fixation durations), but decreased L1 reading fluency (slower reading rates, longer forward fixation durations). We also found that bilinguals with high versus low current L2 exposure were more affected by reductions in window size during L2 reading (indicative of a larger L2 perceptual span), but were less affected by reductions in window size during L1 reading (indicative of a smaller L1 perceptual span). Taken together, these findings suggest that individual differences in current L2 exposure among bilinguals also modulate more general aspects of reading behavior, including global measures of reading difficulty and the allocation of visual attention into the parafovea during both L1 and L2 sentence-level reading.