Recent research on bilingualism has shown that lexical access in visual word recognition by bilinguals is not selective with respect to language. The present study investigated language-independent lexical access in bilinguals reading sentences, which constitutes a strong unilingual linguistic context. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performing a L2 lexical decision task were faster to recognize identical and non-identical cognate words (e.g. banaan -banana) presented in isolation than control words.A second experiment replicated this effect when the same set of cognates was presented as the final words of low-constraint sentences. In a third experiment using eyetracking, we showed that early target reading time measures also yield cognate facilitation, but only for identical cognates. These results suggest that a sentence context may influence, but does not nullify, cross-lingual lexical interactions during early visual word recognition by bilinguals. Keywords: bilingualism, visual word recognition, sentence context, cognate Bilingual Word Recognition in Sentences 3Visual Word Recognition by Bilinguals in a Sentence Context: Evidence for Non-selective Lexical AccessDuring the last decade, research on visual word recognition in bilinguals has been dominated by studies investigating whether both languages are processed by functionally and structurally independent systems or not. The most intuitively appealing theory about this issue would probably be that bilinguals have two separate language systems and lexicons: one for the native language (L1) and one for the second language ( L2). However, a lot of evidence has been gathered against this hypothesis: interlingual interactions have been observed at different representational levels, even when bilinguals are processing unilingual sets of words and therefore have no reason to keep an irrelevant language active. Thus far, the majority of these studies have focused on orthographic lexical representations. They have consistently shown that access to these representations is not language specific. Orthographic lexical representations from L2 are accessed during (and interact early with) L1 reading and vice versa (e.g., Dijkstra, Timmermans, & Schriefers, 2000;Dijkstra, Grainger, & Van Heuven, 1999;Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002; for a recent review, see Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). Recently, a few studies have shown that the languageindependent lexical access claim also holds for phonological representations. For example, Duyck (2005) has shown that masked nonword primes are coded through L1 grapheme conversion rules when reading L2 target words (and vice versa), suggesting that phonological representations from one language may be activated when reading in another language (see also Jared & Kroll, 2001).Because the ongoing debate has almost been settled in favor of this language-independent lexical access hypothesis (for both orthographic and phonological lexical representations), it may be time to put into question the ecological validity and ...

The authors examined word skipping in reading in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, skipping rates were higher for a preview of a predictable word than for a visually similar nonword, indicating there is full recognition in parafoveal vision. In Experiment 2, foveal load was manipulated by varying the frequency of the word preceding either a 3-letter target word or a misspelled preview. There was again a higher skipping rate for a correct preview and a lower skipping rate when there was a high foveal load, but there was no interaction, and the pattern of effects in fixation times was the same as in the skipping data. Experiment 2 also showed significant skipping of nonwords similar to the target word, indicating skipping based on partial information.

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The extent to which target words were predictable from prior context was varied: half of the target words were predictable and the other half were unpredictable. In addition, the length of the target word varied: the target words were short (4–6 letters), medium (7–9 letters), or long (10–12 letters). Length and predictability both yielded strong effects on the probability of skipping the target words and on the amount of time readers fixated the target words (when they were not skipped). However, there was no interaction in any of the measures examined for either skipping or fixation time. The results demonstrate that word predictability (due to contextual constraint) and word length have strong and independent influences on word skipping and fixation durations. Furthermore, since the long words extended beyond the word identification span, the data indicate that skipping can occur on the basis of partial information in relation to word identity.

Recent research using word recognition paradigms such as lexical decision and speeded pronunciation has investigated how a range of variables affect the location and shape of response time distributions, using both parametric and non-parametric techniques. In this article, we explore the distributional effects of a word frequency manipulation on fixation durations in normal reading, making use of data from two recent eye movement experiments (Drieghe, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 2008;White, 2008). The ex-Gaussian distribution provided a good fit to the shape of individual subjects' distributions in both experiments. The frequency manipulation affected both the shift and skew of the distributions, in both experiments, and this conclusion was supported by the nonparametric vincentizing technique. Finally, a new experiment demonstrated that White's (2008) frequency manipulation also affects both shift and skew in RT distributions in the lexical decision task. These results argue against models of eye movement control in reading that propose that word frequency influences only a subset of fixations, and support models in which there is a tight connection between eye movement control and the progress of lexical processing.It is well known that the time the eyes spend on a word in reading is a function of a range of linguistic factors (see Staub & Rayner, 2007;Rayner, 1998Rayner, , 2009, for reviews). For example, a word's printed frequency (Inhoff & Rayner, 1986;Rayner & Duffy, 1986) and its predictability in context (Ehrlich & Rayner, 1981;Rayner, Ashby, Pollatsek, & Reichle, 2004) each have substantial effects on measures such as the duration of the reader's first eye fixation on the word (first fixation duration), and the summed duration of all fixations before the eyes leave the word (gaze duration); as frequency and predictability each decrease, the mean durations increase.These empirical findings are among the benchmark phenomena that models of eye movement control in reading such as E-Z Reader (Pollatsek, Reichle, & Rayner, 2006;Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998;Reichle, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 2003) and SWIFT (Engbert, Nuthmann, Richter, & Kliegl, 2005) attempt to account for. In E-Z Reader, for example, it is the progress of lexical processing that determines when a saccade program will be initiated. Specifically, the model proposes that a saccade is initiated when the word processing system has completed an initial stage of processing, referred to as L1 (originally termed a familiarity check), on the Address correspondence to: Adrian Staub, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, 430 Tobin Hall, Amherst, MA 01003; astaub@psych.umass.edu; phone: (413) 545-5925; fax: (413) NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript fixated word, and that word frequency and predictability additively influence how long this stage takes to complete (Rayner et al., 2004).There remains, however, a family of theories of eye movement control in reading which, while not denyi...

This article introduces GECO, the Ghent EyeTracking Corpus, a monolingual and bilingual corpus of the eyetracking data of participants reading a complete novel. English monolinguals and Dutch-English bilinguals read an entire novel, which was presented in paragraphs on the screen. The bilinguals read half of the novel in their first language, and the other half in their second language. In this article, we describe the distributions and descriptive statistics of the most important reading time measures for the two groups of participants. This large eyetracking corpus is perfectly suited for both exploratory purposes and more directed hypothesis testing, and it can guide the formulation of ideas and theories about naturalistic reading processes in a meaningful context. Most importantly, this corpus has the potential to evaluate the generalizability of monolingual and bilingual language theories and models to the reading of long texts and narratives. The corpus is freely available at http://expsy.ugent.be/downloads/ geco.Keywords Bilingualism . Reading . Eyetracking . Corpus study Over the years, linguistic data gathered in experimental settings have driven the development of ideas and theories about the cognitive processes involved in language performance. Usually, these experiments are designed to test one or more specific hypotheses and use a meticulously selected and restricted stimulus set, containing one or more, often orthogonal, experimental manipulations. More recently, with the development of larger, and more complex, computational-reading models that operate on multiple processing levels and/or cover a wide range of phenomena (e.g.,

Compared to skilled adult readers, children typically make more fixations that are longer in duration, shorter saccades, and more regressions, thus reading more slowly (Blythe & Joseph, 2011). Recent attempts to understand the reasons for these differences have discovered some similarities (e.g., children and adults target their saccades similarly; Joseph, Liversedge, Blythe, White, & Rayner, 2009) and some differences (e.g., children’s fixation durations are more affected by lexical variables; Blythe, Liversedge, Joseph, White, & Rayner, 2009) that have yet to be explained. In this article, the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading (Reichle, 2011; Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998) is used to simulate various eye-movement phenomena in adults vs. children in order to evaluate hypotheses about the concurrent development of reading skill and eye-movement behavior. These simulations suggest that the primary difference between children and adults is their rate of lexical processing, and that different rates of (post-lexical) language processing may also contribute to some phenomena (e.g., children’s slower detection of semantic anomalies; Joseph et al., 2008). The theoretical implications of this hypothesis are discussed, including possible alternative accounts of these developmental changes, how reading skill and eye movements change across the entire lifespan (e.g., college-aged vs. older readers), and individual differences in reading ability.

Contrasting predictions of serial and parallel views on the processing of foveal and parafoveal information during reading were tested. A high-frequency adjective (young) was followed by either a high-frequency wordn (child) or a low-frequency wordn (tenor), which in turn was followed by either a correct (performing) or an orthographic illegal wordn+1 (pxvforming) as a parafoveal preview. A limited parafoveal-on-foveal effect was observed: There were inflated fixation times on wordn when the preview of wordn+1 was orthographically illegal. However, this parafoveal-on-foveal effect was (a) independent of the frequency of wordn, (b) restricted to those instances when the eyes were very close to wordn+1, and (c) associated with relatively long prior saccades. These observations are all compatible with a mislocated fixation account in which parafoveal-on-foveal effects result from saccadic undershoots of wordn+1 and with a serial model of eye movement control during reading.