Cross-Linguistic Research on Reading

The aim of cross-linguistic research on reading is to identify both universal and language-specific mechanisms underlying the reading process, and to investigate how typological features of languages affect language processing. This line of research explores how readers of different linguistic backgrounds adapt their cognitive and perceptual processes to the specific characteristics of their native language, providing deeper insight into the complex interactions between language, cognition, and visual information.

To search for universal and language-specific mechanisms of reading, both corpus-based approaches (see the MECO project: Kliegl et al., 2004; Laurinavichyute et al., 2019; Sui et al., 2022) and classical experimental paradigms can be used. For instance, Zdorova et al. (2023) describe similarities and differences in eye-movement patterns of Adyghe–Russian bilinguals while reading sentences in both languages, and Parshina et al. (2024) compare the effect of word length on eye movements while reading in Russian to its effect in other well-studied languages.

On the one hand, the studies confirm universal reading mechanisms: word frequency and word length significantly affect eye-movement patterns in synthetic Russian, polysynthetic Adyghe, and analytic English. At the same time, they reveal phenomena unique to particular languages — for example, the limited influence of word-form frequency in Adyghe, in contrast to other languages.

Publications

Zdorova, N., Parshina, O., Ogly, B., Bagirokova, I., Krasikova, E., Ziubanova, A., ... & Dragoy, O. (2023). Eye movement corpora in Adyghe and Russian: an eye-tracking study of sentence reading in bilinguals. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1212701. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1212701 

Parshina, O., Zdorova, N., & Kuperman, V. (2024). Cross-linguistic comparison in reading sentences of uniform length: Visual–perceptual demands override readers’ experience. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77(8), 1694–1702. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218231206719