Developmental Change in the Reading Measures of Russian Students Learning Chinese: A Longitudinal Eye-Tracking Study

The aim of the current study is to investigate the development of reading skill of Russian learners of Chinese at an early stage of language learning. In order to do so, the author set up a longitudinal study in which students' reading performance was monitored at different points of the instruction process. Four lists, each consisting of 120 Chinese sentences, were created for the study. The length of the sentences varied from 7 to 19 characters. Sentences differed in difficulty so that learners could read challenging sentences at every stage of their language learning. 27 first-year students and 20 second-year students participated in the first stage of the longitudinal study that took place during the winter break, 26 first-year students and 13 second-year students participated in the second stage that took place during the summer break. Participants silently read Chinese sentences while their eye movements were recorded using an Eyelink 1000 Plus eye-tracking system with a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. Each sentence was followed by a translation verification task: participants were asked to check if the Russian translation of the Chinese sentence was correct. An additional Chinese sentence that read 'Please read the next sentence" was inserted after the verification task to mitigate the possible unwanted effect of switching between reading in two different writing systems. The resulting data were analyzed using a linear mixed models approach. Results indicate that there is some developmental change in both early and late reading measures. First-pass sentence reading time, first fixation duration, gaze duration, regression rate, and probability of refixation on a character decreased as duration of instruction increased, while probability of skipping a character increased. The initial landing position on the character shifted towards the middle of the character in more proficient students. Additionally, the author found evidence for interaction between duration of instruction and some predictors of reading performance: more experienced students skipped visually simple characters more often that less experienced students; however, there was no difference in skip probability for visually complex characters. There was an interaction between character complexity and duration of instruction on first fixation duration: first fixation duration on visually simple characters was similar for students after two terms of instruction, while first fixation duration on visually complex characters showed only gradual improvement. There was also a similar interaction between launch site and duration of instruction on first fixation duration: durations were similar for students after two terms of instruction for short launch sites, while there was gradual improvement for long launch sites.

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