Eye-tracking as a window into assembled phonology in native and non-native reading

Abstract

The past 30 years of reading research has confirmed the importance of bottom-up processing. Rather than a psycholinguistic guessing game (Goodman, 1967), reading is dependent on rapid, accurate recognition of written forms. In fluent first language (L1) readers, this is seen in the automatic activation of a word’s phonological form, impacting lexical processing (Perfetti & Bell, 1991; Rayner, Sereno, Lesch & Pollatsek, 1995). Although the influence of phonological form is well established, less clear is the extent to which readers are sensitive to the possible pronunciations of a word (Lesch & Pollatsek, 1998), derived from the varying consistency of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) (e.g., although ‘great’ has only one pronunciation, [ɡɹeɪt], the grapheme <ea> within it has multiple possible pronunciations: [i] in [plit] ‘pleat’, [ɛ] in [bɹɛθ] ‘breath’; Parkin, 1982). Further, little is known about non-native readers’ sensitivity to such characteristics. Non-native readers process text differently from L1 readers (Koda & Zehler, 2008; McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong & Li, 2004), with implications for understanding L2 reading comprehension (Rayner, Chace, Slattery & Ashby, 2006). The goal of this study was thus to determine whether native and non-native readers are sensitive to the consistency of a word’s component GPCs during lexical processing and to compare this sensitivity among readers from different L1s.

What Can Eye Movements Tell Us about Reading in a Second Language: A Scoping Review of the Literature

“…Taken together, the findings from Cui [33], Egan et al [24], Friesen and Jared [38], Demareva et al [42], Rodriguez et al [44], Whitford and Titone [40], Taylor and Mukai [36], Sui et al [37], Martin and Juffs [31], Mor and Prior [48], Winskel et al [28], and Xiao et al [32] shed light on the relationship between orthographical characteristics and reading in bilingual individuals. For example, findings from Friesen and Jared [38] and Rodriguez and colleagues [44] illuminate the role of language structure.…”

“…General/Background Study Information Among the 21 studies comparing monolinguals' to bilinguals' performance and eye movements, seven employed natural reading tasks with alphabetic (n = 6 [17][18][19][20][21][22]) and non-alphabetic (n = 1 [14]) orthographies. Fourteen of the studies included a manipulation in the reading task with alphabetic (n = 8 [15,16,[23][24][25][26][27][28]) and nonalphabetic (n = 6 [29][30][31][32][33]) orthographies, and one study [34] did not specify participants' L1 language background. Across all studies, four types of stimuli were used: words (n = 1), sentences (n = 15), paragraphs (n = 4), and passages (n = 1).…”

“…When compared to monolinguals, bilinguals seem to be affected differently by the characteristics of their L1. Martin and Juffs [31] found differences between two groups of bilinguals, when reading in a their L2 (English), although their levels of proficiency and reading skills were comparable. They compared L1 Arabic speakers and L1 Chinese speakers.…”

“…Martin and Juffs [31] explored the effect of orthographic consistency when reading in an L2. To do this, they compared the eye movements (skipping rate, first fixation duration, number of first-pass fixations, gaze durations, total number of fixations, target dwell time, and regressions to the target) of one group of native English speakers to two groups of L2 learners of English, Arabic-English and Chinese-English bilinguals, while reading sentences in English.…”

“…Both non-native groups were less sensitive to vowel grapheme-phoneme consistency compared to native speakers. Arabic uses a consonantal system, meaning that they do not write vowels, driving a strategy where vowels are ignored [31]. This can affect such individuals during their processing of vowels when reading English, causing downstream variations in eye movements as indicated by first-pass metrics.…”