Abstract
Reading strategies vary across languages according to orthographic depth – the complexity of the grapheme in relation to phoneme conversion rules – notably at the level of eye movement patterns. We recently demonstrated that a group of early bilinguals, who learned both languages equally under the age of seven, presented a first fixation location (FFL) closer to the beginning of words when reading in German as compared with French. Since German is known to be orthographically more transparent than French, this suggested that different strategies were being engaged depending on the orthographic depth of the used language. Opaque languages induce a global reading strategy, and transparent languages force a local/serial strategy. Thus, pseudo-words were processed using a local strategy in both languages, suggesting that the link between word forms and their lexical representation may also play a role in selecting a specific strategy. In order to test whether corresponding effects appear in late bilinguals with low proficiency in their second language (L2), we present a new study in which we recorded eye movements while two groups of late German–French and French–German bilinguals read aloud isolated French and German words and pseudo-words. Since, a transparent reading strategy is local and serial, with a high number of fixations per stimuli, and the level of the bilingual participants’ L2 is low, the impact of language opacity should be observed in L1. We therefore predicted a global reading strategy if the bilinguals’ L1 was French (FFL close to the middle of the stimuli with fewer fixations per stimuli) and a local and serial reading strategy if it was German. Thus, the L2 of each group, as well as pseudo-words, should also require a local and serial reading strategy. Our results confirmed these hypotheses, suggesting that global word processing is only achieved by bilinguals with an opaque L1 when reading in an opaque language; the low level in the L2 gives way to a local and serial reading strategy. These findings stress the fact that reading behavior is influenced not only by the linguistic mode but also by top–down factors, such as readers’ proficiency.
Highlights
Reading strategies depend on the language being read (Frost, 2012)
Reading aloud is achieved via a lexical route for words with complex grapheme–phoneme conversion rules (GPC), in which the rules for generating phonemes from graphemes are likely to be established by lexical-semantic knowledge
There was a significant main effect of participants’ L1 on first fixation location (FFL) [F(1,38.8) = 3.98, p = 0.053] and fixations per stimulus processed (FC) [F(1,40.2) = 5.66, p = 0.022], as FFL was closer to the beginning of the stimuli (26.72 vs. 31.05%) with higher FC for bilinguals with German-L1 as compared with bilinguals with French-L1 (2.82 vs. 2.60)
Summary
Reading strategies depend on the language being read (Frost, 2012). Since the rules for converting the written code (graphemes) into oral production (phonemes, i.e., the smallest meaningful units of written language into their analogies in spoken language) vary across languages, different languages should engage distinct behavioral and neural reading processes. Based on this assumption the “Orthographic Depth Hypothesis” (Katz and Feldman, 1983; Katz and Frost, 1992) postulates that different strategies are involved in reading languages with varying degrees of opacity Transparent languages such as Spanish and German, in which the majority of the words follow simple grapheme–phoneme conversion rules (GPC), should be read differently from opaque languages such as English and French, in which most of the words follow ambiguous GPC (Ziegler et al, 2001; Seymour et al, 2003; Simon et al, 2006; Bar-Kochva and Breznitz, 2012; Joshi et al, 2012). The model envisages a cascaded principle corresponding to an activation of both routes; phonology is always partially assembled and partially lexical, but not necessarily fully specified by both routes
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