Reading in a Second language: an Eyetracking Study
My PhD is part of the GOA-project ?The interface between memory and language in multilingualism?. More specifically, I will be investigating reading in a second language by means of analyzing readers? eye movements, both on word and sentence level. Next to conducting experiments of my own I will explore data of a bilingual eyetracking corpus (by Uschi Cop). The goal of my PhD is twofold. First I want to uncover differences between first (L1) and second language (L2) reading. For this purpose, I will investigate if specific reading effects in L1 also apply to L2 reading (e.g., neighborhood density and frequency effect, age of acquisition effect, homograph effect, word predictability,?). Second, I want to reveal the underlying mechanisms of differences in L1 and L2 reading. Other researchers put forward some hypotheses that could explain these differences (e.g., the weaker links hypothesis, the cross-linguistic interference hypothesis and the resource hypothesis). By analyzing certain eye movement variables (such as fixation times, saccades, skipping rates and pupil dilation) I want to provide evidence that could contribute to (one of) these hypotheses.
