Berzak Yevgeni, Levy Roger
Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachussets Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Open Mind (Camb). 2023 Jun 5;7:179-196. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00084. eCollection 2023.
The detailed study of eye movements in reading has shed considerable light into how language processing unfolds in real time. Yet eye movements in reading remain inadequately studied in non-native (L2) readers, even though much of the world's population is multilingual. Here we present a detailed analysis of the quantitative functional influences of word length, frequency, and predictability on eye movement measures in reading in a large, linguistically diverse sample of non-native English readers. We find many similar qualitative effects as in L1 readers, but crucially also a proficiency-sensitive "". The most proficient L2 readers' eye movements approach an L1 pattern, but as L2 proficiency diminishes, readers' eye movements become less sensitive to a word's predictability in context and more sensitive to word frequency, which is context-invariant. This tradeoff supports a rational, experience-dependent account of how context-driven expectations are deployed in L2 language processing.
对阅读中眼动的详细研究为语言处理如何实时展开提供了相当多的见解。然而，尽管世界上大部分人口都是多语言者，但非母语（第二语言，L2）读者阅读时的眼动仍未得到充分研究。在此，我们对大量语言背景多样的非英语母语读者阅读时单词长度、频率和可预测性对眼动测量的定量功能影响进行了详细分析。我们发现了许多与第一语言（L1）读者相似的定性效应，但关键的是也有一个熟练度敏感的“”。最熟练的第二语言读者的眼动接近第一语言模式，但随着第二语言熟练度的降低，读者的眼动对单词在语境中的可预测性变得不那么敏感，而对单词频率变得更敏感，单词频率是与语境无关的。这种权衡支持了一种基于理性、依赖经验的解释，即语境驱动的预期在第二语言处理中是如何部署的。
