Assessing Language Proficiency from Eye Movements in Reading

Berzak, Yevgeni; Katz, Boris; Lévy, Roger

doi:10.18653/v1/n18-1180

Cited by 17 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Whitford and Titone (2012, 2016, 2017) who recorded eye movements of late L2 bilinguals of various ages (18–86 years), different language dominance (English or French), and proficiency found that the amount of exposure to the weaker language determined the magnitude of the frequency effect, with lower levels of exposure leading to larger frequency effects in early and late eye-movement measures in L2. Berzak, Katz and Levy (2018) recently demonstrated that the proficiency level in L2 could affect eye movements even more directly. They found that first fixation duration and total reading times not only correlated with standardized tests of English language proficiency ( MET : r = .5 and TOEFL : r = .54) but were also effective in predicting the outcomes of these tests.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye-movement benchmarks in Heritage Language reading

2020

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This eye-tracking study establishes basic benchmarks of eye movements during reading in heritage language (HL) by Russian-speaking adults and adolescents of high (n = 21) and low proficiency (n = 27). Heritage speakers (HSs) read sentences in Cyrillic, and their eye movements were compared to those of Russian monolingual skilled adult readers, 8-year-old children and L2 learners. Reading patterns of HSs revealed longer mean fixation durations, lower skipping probabilities, and higher regressive saccade rates than in monolingual adults. High-proficient HSs were more similar to monolingual children, while low-proficient HSs performed on par with L2 learners. Low-proficient HSs differed from high-proficient HSs in exhibiting lower skipping probabilities, higher fixation counts, and larger frequency effects. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the weaker links account of bilingual language processing as well as the divergent attainment theory of HL.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye-movement benchmarks in Heritage Language reading

2020

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“…A subset of CELER (CELER v1) was previously used in two studies, Berzak et al (2017) and Berzak et al (2018). Berzak et al (2017) used the L2 part of the data, and capitalized on the four native languages of the L2 participants in CELER v1 to demonstrate that the native language of L2 speakers can be decoded from eye-movement features during reading.…”

Section: Uses Of the Corpusmentioning

confidence: 99%

CELER: A 365-Participant Corpus of Eye Movements in L1 and L2 English Reading

Berzak

Nakamura

et al. 2022

Open Mind

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We present CELER (Corpus of Eye Movements in L1 and L2 English Reading), a broad coverage eye-tracking corpus for English. CELER comprises over 320,000 words, and eye-tracking data from 365 participants. Sixty-nine participants are L1 (first language) speakers, and 296 are L2 (second language) speakers from a wide range of English proficiency levels and five different native language backgrounds. As such, CELER has an order of magnitude more L2 participants than any currently available eye movements dataset with L2 readers. Each participant in CELER reads 156 newswire sentences from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), in a new experimental design where half of the sentences are shared across participants and half are unique to each participant. We provide analyses that compare L1 and L2 participants with respect to standard reading time measures, as well as the effects of frequency, surprisal, and word length on reading times. These analyses validate the corpus and demonstrate some of its strengths. We envision CELER to enable new types of research on language processing and acquisition, and to facilitate interactions between psycholinguistics and natural language processing (NLP).

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“…As outlined in Section 3.3, an effective approach for text simplification in assistive technology is to include the user in the decision of what is simplified. Prior research has shown that eye-tracking (Berzak et al, 2018) and scroll-based interactions (Gooding et al, 2021a) correlate with text understanding. As such, these implicit techniques can be used to gain an insight into what the reader is finding difficult.…”

Section: Privacy and Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Ethical Considerations of Text Simplification

Gooding¹

2022

Ninth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT-2022)

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This paper outlines the ethical implications of text simplification within the framework of assistive systems. We argue that a distinction should be made between the technologies that perform text simplification and the realisation of these in assistive technologies. When using the latter as a motivation for research, it is important that the subsequent ethical implications be carefully considered. We provide guidelines for the framing of text simplification independently of assistive systems, as well as suggesting directions for future research and discussion based on the concerns raised.

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Assessing Language Proficiency from Eye Movements in Reading

Cited by 17 publications

References 42 publications

Eye-movement benchmarks in Heritage Language reading

Eye-movement benchmarks in Heritage Language reading

CELER: A 365-Participant Corpus of Eye Movements in L1 and L2 English Reading

On the Ethical Considerations of Text Simplification

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