The impact of uninformative parafoveal masks on L1 and late L2 speakers

摘要

Much reading research has found that informative parafoveal masks lead to a readingbenefit for native speakers (see 1). However, little reading researchhas tested the impact of uninformative parafoveal masks during reading. Additionally,parafoveal processing research is primarily restricted to native speakers. In the currentstudy we manipulated the type of uninformative preview using a gaze contingent boundaryparadigm with a group of L1 English speakers and a group of late L2 English speakers (L1German). We were interested in how different types of uninformative masks impact onparafoveal processing, whether L1 and L2 speakers are similarly impacted, and whetherthey are sensitive to parafoveally viewed language-specific sub-lexical orthographic information.We manipulated six types of uninformative masks to test these objectives: anIdentical, English pseudo-word, German pseudo-word, illegal string of letters, series ofX’s, and a blank mask. We found that X masks affect reading the most with slight gradeddifferences across the other masks, L1 and L2 speakers are impacted similarly, and neithergroup is sensitive to sub-lexical orthographic information. Overall these data show thatnot all previews are equal, and research should be aware of the way uninformative masksaffect reading behavior. Additionally, we hope that future research starts to approachmodels of eye-movement behavior during reading from not only a monolingual but alsofrom a multilingual perspective.