The Effect of Individual Differences on Eye Movements During Reading in Russian-English Bilinguals

Reading in a second language has recently been attracting more interest among bilingual researchers. While the topic of bilingual word recognition is commonly investigated in psycholinguistics, the patterns of eye movements during reading in a second language are less studied. The aim of our eye-tracking study was to assess the influence of individual differences in both L2 (age of acquisition, proficiency, vocabulary size, spelling skills, word recognition efficiency, phonemic decoding skills, level of exposure to L2) and L1 (spelling skills, vocabulary size) linguistic skills on bilingual reading. We expected to see faster reading times in bilinguals with a lower AoA and higher level of language exposure and hypothesized that vocabulary size and proficiency could also be significant, while the role of the other factors was less clear. After analyzing the data of 51 proficient Russian-English bilinguals reading 12 texts in a second language, we found that higher scores on a phonemic decoding assessment led to shorter fixation durations in early reading measures that reflect initial lexical access, while reading experience and the results of a test which predicts both vocabulary size and proficiency matter in later word processing, which is associated with semantic integration, information reanalysis and general comprehension difficulties. Additionally, more reading experience meant a lower number of regressions. These results could be indicative, on the one hand, of the difficulties bilinguals experience during reading in a script that is different from the one in their native language, and on the other hand, of the fact that general reading experience facilitates L2 reading. We discuss these results in the context of previous studies and outline our plan for future research.