Children’s eye movements during first and second language reading (Second)

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Simon Tiffin-Richards
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409562690

Eye tracking has become an important method for investigating reading processes and has helped establish an understanding of how key processes develop with reading skill. However, few eye movement studies have considered second language acquisition and as yet none have investigated the concurrent development of reading processes in children’s first and second language. With this research program I therefore intend to pursue two main aims to fill this gap. The first aim is to assess the relationship of children’s reading processes in their first language (German) and their first foreign language of tuition (English) using sophisticated eye tracking methodology together with experimentally manipulated reading tasks and standardized language assessments. This will allow the investigation of how specific component processes of reading in a child’s first and second language are related. The second aim is to track the development of children’s first and second language reading processes in parallel across the critical early years of foreign language tuition. This longitudinal aspect is essential, as purely cross-sectional studies cannot identify causal relationships between concurrently developing processes. To achieve these aims, I intend to recruit a large sample of upper-primary school children to participate in a longitudinal study from Grade 5 to Grade 6. Measures of language skills will range from vocabulary knowledge and single word recognition to the processing of sentences and texts. This will allow a detailed assessment of how specific marker effects, such as word length, frequency, and predictability effects, are related between a child’s first language and their first foreign language. I expect to demonstrate a qualitatively similar development of reading processes in children’s first and second language and a strong relationship of reading processes and vocabulary skills within each language, as well as a degree of cross-over facilitation between languages.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants