Word processing during reading is known to be influenced by lexical features, especially word length, frequency, and predictability. This study examined the relative importance of these features in word processing during second language (L2) English reading. We used data from an eye-tracking corpus and applied a machine-learning approach to model word-level eye-tracking measures and identify key predictors. Predictors comprised several lexical features, including length, frequency, and predictability (e.g., surprisal). Additionally, sentence, passage, and reader characteristics were considered for comparison. The analysis found that word length was the most important variable across several eye-tracking measures. However, for certain measures, word frequency and predictability were more important than length, and in some cases, reader characteristics such as proficiency were more significant than lexical features. These findings highlight the complexity of word processing during reading, the shared processes between first language (L1) and L2 reading, and their potential to refine models of eye-movement control.

Word age of acquisition (AoA) influences many aspects of language processing, including reading. However, reading studies of word AoA effects have almost exclusively focused on monolingual young adults, leaving their influence in other age and language groups little understood. Here, we investigated how age (childhood, young adulthood) and language background (monolingual, bilingual) influence word AoA effects during first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading. Using eye-tracking, we observed larger L1 word AoA effects in children versus adults (across both language backgrounds). Moreover, we observed larger L2 versus L1 word AoA effects in bilinguals (across both ages), with some evidence of heightened effects in bilingual adults (for late-stage reading only). Taken together, our findings suggest that word AoA exerts a stronger influence on reading during conditions of reduced lexical entrenchment, offering critical insights into how both developing and bilingual readers acquire and maintain word representations across their known languages.

Line breaks are ubiquitous in continuous text, as in this article. Despite this prevalence, their effects on parsing and interpretation have been markedly understudied in previous research on written language processing. To shed light on these effects, we conducted a self-paced reading and an eye-tracking study in which participants read multiline texts that contained direct object–subject ambiguity, a type of temporary clause boundary ambiguity. Within these texts, we manipulated the placement of line breaks so that they either regularly coincided or clashed with clause boundaries. We hypothesised that this manipulation would cause readers to adjust their parsing strategies and interpretative commitments. Results revealed that the way in which text is segmented through line breaks can significantly affect how readers parse syntactically ambiguous structures. While coinciding line breaks and clause boundaries helped readers arrive at the correct analysis of the ambiguous structures, cases of line break and clause boundary clash led readers down the garden path during online processing, and in some cases also impacted their comprehension. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the importance of text segmentation in real-world settings, such as books, educational material and digital content.

It is commonly stated that the direction in which we read and write influences our conceptualisation of the flow of time. However, research to date has only established a causal link between reading direction and temporal thought, leaving out the question of whether the act of writing indeed shapes the mental timeline. The current study addresses this gap by examining whether writing direction modulates how events are mapped onto time. Consistent with previous findings, results from a reading experiment showed that participants who read mirror texts (right-to-left orthography) indeed mapped time as flowing leftwards. However, contrary to prevailing assumptions, results from a series of writing experiments showed that participants assigned to a mirror writing condition (right-to-left orthography) displayed the same left-to-right mapping of the flow of time as participants in the standard writing condition (left-to-right orthography), despite progressive increases in mirror-writing training. It is suggested that the act of writing does not shape time concepts because it is not unambiguously unidirectional: the fine-motoric action of forming individual letters is multidirectional and thus interferes with the lateral time–space association obtained with the gross-motoric action of moving the hand/arm sideways.

Based on the simple view of reading (SVR), we investigated factors associated with reading comprehension in Second Language (L2) minority children learning a highly consistent orthography through a network analysis. Bilingual and monolingual children participated in the research. Consistent with prior findings, reading speed supported reading comprehension for L1 learners, whereas, for L2 learners, correct decoding carried greater weight than reading speed. In monolingual children, vocabulary and morphosyntactic comprehension contributed jointly and independently to reading comprehension success. However, only vocabulary facilitated reading comprehension in bilingual children, with morphosyntactic skills showing no influence. While monolinguals benefitted from a rich vocabulary and good morphosyntactic knowledge for reading speed and accuracy, in bilingual children, only L2 reading speed was affected by linguistic skills.

This paper reports an expansion of the English as a second language (L2) component of the Multilingual Eye Movement Corpus (MECO L2), an international database of eye movements during text reading. While the previous Wave 1 of the MECO project (Kuperman et al., 2023) contained English as a L2 reading data from readers with 12 different first language (L1) backgrounds, the newly collected dataset adds eye-tracking data on English text reading from 13 distinct L1 backgrounds (N = 660) as well as participants’ scores on component skills of English proficiency and information about their demographics and language background and use. The paper reports reliability estimates, descriptive statistics, and correlational analyses as means to validate the expansion dataset. Consistent with prior literature and the MECO Wave 1, trends in the MECO Wave 2 data include a weak correlation between reading comprehension and oculomotor measures of reading fluency and a greater L1-L2 contrast in reading fluency than reading comprehension. Jointly with Wave 1, the MECO project includes English reading data from more than 1,200 readers representing a diversity of native writing systems (logographic, abjad, abugida, and alphabetic) and 19 distinct L1 backgrounds. We provide multiple pointers to new venues of how L2 reading researchers can mine this rich publicly available dataset.

Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, children read ironic and literal sentences embedded in stories while their eye movements were recorded. Next, the training group was taught about irony, and the control group was taught about reading comprehension. At post-test, the reading task and eye-tracking were repeated. Irony comprehension improved after metapragmatic training on irony, suggesting that metapragmatic knowledge serves an important role in irony development. However, the eye movement data suggested that training did not change the strategy children used to resolve the ironic meaning. The results highlight the potential of metapragmatic training and have implications for theories of irony comprehension.

The proactive gain control hypothesis suggests that the global language context regulates lexical access to the bilinguals’ languages during reading. Specifically, with increasing exposure to non-target language cues, bilinguals adjust the lexical activation to allow non-target language access from the earliest word recognition stages. Using the invisible boundary paradigm, we examined the flow of lexical activation in 50 proficient Russian-English bilinguals reading in their native Russian while the language context shifted from a monolingual to a bilingual environment. We gradually introduced non-target language cues (the language of experimenter and fillers) while also manipulating the type of word previews (identical, code-switches, unrelated code-switches, pseudowords). The results revealed the facilitatory reading effects of code-switches but only in the later lexical processing stages and these effects were independent of the global language context manipulation. The results are discussed from the perspective of limitations imposed by script differences on bilingual language control flexibility.

Liechty, Pieters, and Wedel (2003) report an eye-tracking experiment that is taken to support the distinction between two states of covert visual attention: local versus global. We discuss several logical problems with this dichotomy and their experiment, and then provide an alternate account of their data using a model, E-Z Reader, that requires only a single attention state.