Monolingual and Bilingual Reading Processes in Russian: An Exploratory Scanpath Analysis

Abstract

In the present study, we used a scanpath approach to investigate reading processes and factors that can shape them in monolingual Russian‐speaking adults, 8‐year‐old children, and bilingual Russian‐speaking readers. We found that monolingual adults’ eye movement patterns exhibited a fluent scanpath reading process, representing effortless processing of the written material: They read straight from left to right at a fast pace, skipped words, and regressed rarely. Both high‐proficiency heritage‐language speakers’ and second graders’ eye movement patterns exhibited an intermediate scanpath reading process, characterized by a slower pace, longer fixations, an absence of word skipping, and short regressive saccades. Second‐language learners and low‐proficiency heritage‐language speakers exhibited a beginner reading process that involved the slowest pace, even longer fixations, no word skipping, and frequent rereading of the whole sentence and of particular words. We suggest that unlike intermediate readers who use the respective process to resolve local processing difficulties (e.g., word recognition failure), beginner readers, in addition, experience global‐level challenges in semantic and morphosyntactic information integration. Proficiency in Russian for heritage‐language speakers and comprehension scores for second‐language learners were the only individual difference factors predictive of the scanpath reading process adopted by bilingual speakers. Overall, the scanpath analysis revealed qualitative differences in scanpath reading processes among various groups of readers and thus adds a qualitative dimension to the conventional quantitative evaluation of word‐level eye‐tracking measures.

Scanpath Regularity as an Index of Reading Comprehension

“…The relationship between scanpath regularity measures and comprehension is mostly consistent with previous studies suggesting that more regular scanpaths tend to be associated with better comprehension and reading skills (Parshina et al, 2021;von der Malsburg et al, 2015). This pattern was found across comprehension measures, suggesting the existence of a single optimal reading process, and that readers who deviate from it in some way tend to have lower comprehension scores.…”

“…A potential limitation to predictive power of scanpath regularity is the aforementioned fact that readers adapt their reading strategies to differences in task demands between reading tasks (Bax & Chan, 2019;Kaakinen & Hyönä, 2010;O'Reilly et al, 2012;Radach et al, 2008;Schotter, Bicknell, et al, 2014). Like all eye-movement measures, this will limit the degree to which scanpath regularity identified in previous studies (e.g., the 'fluent' strategy in Parshina et al, 2021) can generalize across reading tasks and studies. However, unlike other eye-movement measures, scanpath regularity assesses eye movements relative to the most common reading strategy employed to meet task demands -regardless of what those demands are.…”

“…However, there are inconsistent findings regarding the types of predictive eye-movement behaviors. For example, studies have found that better reading comprehension is associated with fewer regressions (Kim et al, 2019;Parshina et al, 2021;Southwell et al, 2020), more regressions (Schotter, Tran, et al, 2014;Wonnacott et al, 2016), or not related to regressions at all (Christianson et al, 2017).…”

Comprehending irony in text: Evidence from scanpaths

“…As such, scanpaths capture the overall pattern of gaze behavior during reading and can be used to investigate global reading strategies of sentences or whole passages of text. Critically, scanpaths have been shown to capture effects that are not necessarily caught by word-level measures (Mézière et al, 2022;Parshina et al, 2022;Von der Malsburg & Vasishth, 2011, 2013. In an early study, von der Malsburg and Vasishth (2013) used scanpaths to identify the processing strategies of readers when they encounter garden path sentences and considered the mediating effect of WMC on which strategy readers used.…”

“…Critically, these distinct patterns and strategies could not have been identified with standardly used word-level measures, showing that scanpaths can capture features of eye-movement behavior not caught by word-level measures. In addition, they found that readers' re-reading behavior and the extent to which they use those three strategies interacted with their WMC, showing that scanpaths are also useful to investigate the role of individual differences in processing strategies used during reading (see also Mézière et al, 2022;Parshina et al, 2022). Hence, scanpaths provide an ideal tool to investigate the strategies readers use in the processing written irony, as well as the role of individual differences such as WMC or comprehension accuracy in reading literal and ironic passages of text.…”