The effect of L2 proficiency on the eye movement measures during L2 reading in Russian-Chinese and Chinese-Russian late bilinguals

In order to investigate how L2 learners adapt to reading in a different writing system the author set up an eye-tracking experiment in which participants with varying degrees of proficiency read texts in L2. 31 Russian-Chinese late bilinguals, 28 Chinese-Russian late bilinguals, all students of Tomsk State University, participated in the experiment. Prior to conducting the experiment, participants were administered proficiency assessment tests comprised of four reading tasks taken from standardised HSK and TORFL proficiency tests. During the experiment, participants read 25 texts in both Chinese and Russian while their eye movements were recorded using an SMI Red 500 eye-tracking system with a sampling rate of 500 Hz. The resulting data were analysed using linear mixed models realised in R language through lme4 package. Proficiency was entered as a fixed factor, participant and stimulus indices were entered as random factors. Russian first year students had longer fixations (~480 ms) than their more experienced counterparts (330-400 ms) when reading Chinese; students also made fewer regressions as their proficiency in L2 increased (32 % and 24 % for the first- and the fifth-year students respectively). Both of those measures approached significance: average fixation duration (%2 = 3.82, df = 1, p = 0.051), regression rate (%2 = 3.21, df = 1, p = 0.073). Saccade length measures remained consistent across participants of all proficiency levels: 0.9-1.2 character spaces for progressive, 2.2-3.2 character spaces for regressive saccades. Interestingly, regressive saccades were two to three times longer than progressive saccades for all Russian participants. Chinese students showed no signs of change in their eye movements measures associated with an increase in L2 proficiency: fixation durations (240 ms), regression rate (30 %), progressive saccade length (5.6 characters), regressive saccade length (4.1 characters). The lack of change in the eye movements of the Chinese students can be attributed to their life-long exposure to alphabetic writing systems through the English language and the Chinese phonetic alphabet (Pin-yin). Russian students, on the other hand, have no prior exposure to logographic writing systems, and thus need time to adapt to a writing system that is based on a different sound mapping principle.

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