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The impact of uninformative parafoveal masks on L1 and late L2 speakers

  • Much reading research has found that informative parafoveal masks lead to a reading benefit for native speakers (see, Schotter et al., 2012). However, little reading research has tested the impact of uninformative parafoveal masks during reading. Additionally, parafoveal processing research is primarily restricted to native speakers. In the current study we manipulated the type of uninformative preview using a gaze contingent boundary paradigm with a group of L1 English speakers and a group of late L2 English speakers (L1 German). We were interested in how different types of uninformative masks impact on parafoveal processing, whether L1 and L2 speakers are similarly impacted, and whether they are sensitive to parafoveally viewed language-specific sub-lexical orthographic information. We manipulated six types of uninformative masks to test these objectives: an Identical, English pseudo-word, German pseudo-word, illegal string of letters, series of X’s, and a blank mask. We found that X masks affect reading the most with slight graded differences across the other masks, L1 and L2 speakers are impacted similarly, and neither group is sensitive to sub-lexical orthographic information. Overall these data show that not all previews are equal, and research should be aware of the way uninformative masks affect reading behavior. Additionally, we hope that future research starts to approach models of eye-movement behavior during reading from not only a monolingual but also from a multilingual perspective.

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Author:Leigh B. FernandezORCiD, Christoph ScheepersORCiD, Shanley E.M. AllenORCiD
URN:urn:nbn:de:hbz:386-kluedo-61612
ISSN:1995-8692
Parent Title (English):Journal of Eye Movement Research
Publisher:Bern Open Publishing
Document Type:Article
Language of publication:English
Date of Publication (online):2020/08/24
Year of first Publication:2020
Publishing Institution:Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Date of the Publication (Server):2020/12/16
Issue:2020, 13(6)
Page Number:26
Source:https://bop.unibe.ch/JEMR/article/view/JEMR.13.6.3
Faculties / Organisational entities:Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Sozialwissenschaften
DDC-Cassification:4 Sprache / 400 Sprache, Linguistik
Collections:Open-Access-Publikationsfonds
Licence (German):Zweitveröffentlichung