Rayner’s influential review article, now 15 years old, already discusses more than 550 articles investigating this topic (for a more recent review:). Hence, this method is considered to be the closest experimental parallel to the natural reading process.ĭuring the last three decades, the development of monolingual theories on visual language comprehension has been heavily influenced by eye tracking research in reading. Additionally, reading processes in eye tracking are not confounded by task-related processes or strategies that other lab tasks (e.g. In combination with other information, such as word length/frequency, this makes it possible to investigate the time course of the reading process. Because of the spatially accuracy and high temporal resolution of eye tracking, it allows us to dissociate early from late eye movement measures. Psycholinguists assume that eye movements during reading reflect language processing, with fixation durations as a marker of the ease of accessing the meaning of a word and integrating this into the current sentence. They occur several times per second and typically move the eyes forward about 7–9 character spaces (for reviews. During these saccades, no meaningful new visual information is gathered. Saccades are necessary to direct the gaze to a new location, bringing new information into the center of the visual field where acuity is best. This entails rapid jerk-like movements (saccades) and short periods of steadiness (fixations). When we read, our eyes move from one position to the next in order to identify and process visual word form information. These data constitute the necessary constraints to generalize models of eye movement behavior to bilingual readers. The present study aims to address this gap by providing a systematic investigation of eye movements when bilinguals read in their native and second language. They do not however consider sentence-level reading parameters, as was done in the monolingual domain, but rather focus on the recognition of target words that are embedded in a sentence context. The few studies that do use sentence materials suggest that having a second language available influences the way the first language is processed. In contrast to the monolingual domain, almost all studies of bilingual reading have focused on the word level. In contrast, current models of eye movements during reading still focus exclusively on monolingual reading, so that we do not know in what way L2 sentence reading differs from L1 reading, or whether merely being a bilingual changes L1 reading. It is now estimated that about half of the world’s population has some knowledge of more than one language, and can therefore considered to be bilingual, following the common Grosjean definition: “ bilinguals are those people who need and use two (or more) languages in their everyday lives”. However, because of the increased globalization of our multicultural society, more and more people acquire, apart from their mother tongue (L1), one or more other languages (L2, 元…). By now, psycholinguistics has gained a good understanding of monolingual reading behavior.
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