Individual differences in word skipping during reading in English as L2

Abstract

The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO; Siegelman et al., 2022) contains data from unbalanced bilinguals reading in their first language (L1) for a variety of languages and in English as their second language (L2). We analyzed word skipping in L2 on the basis of five predictors consisting of the frequency and length of the word in L2 and three measures of individual differences. Besides the L2 proficiency of the participant, two novel measures were also constructed: the average amount of skipping in L1 across participants per language and whether an individual reader skips words often in their L1 compared with other L1 readers in the same language. Word skipping in L2 increased for short and high-frequency words, for participants with higher L2 proficiency, for readers whose L1 featured relatively high average skipping rates compared with the other languages, and especially for participants who skip more often in L1 than their peers. All three individual differences interacted with word length such that their influence was more pronounced for longer words. Our results show that readers prefer to maintain a certain level of word skipping resembling how they read in L1. Due to lower L2 than L1 proficiency in unbalanced bilinguals, word skipping in L2 would often be based on a comparatively less advanced stage in parafoveal word recognition.

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