Join the Second Language Studies Eye-Tracking Lab in welcoming Distinguished Guest Speaker Dr. Alberto Furgoni, Junior Research Fellow at the Herder Institute of the University of Leipzig, Germany. Furgoni received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from University of Basque Country, Spain.

Topic: L2 Readers Retain More Verbatim Information Than Native Readers

Research on memory for gist vs. surface linguistic information seems to converge on the assumption that linguistic information is not retained verbatim, but is transformed into conceptual form and then stored in long-term memory. While conceptual information can be stored and retrieved over long periods of time, verbatim surface information is thought to decay rapidly and almost immediately after processing.

In two eye-tracking experiments, we show that both L1 and L2 adult readers retain verbatim information, but to different extents. In particular, the reading behavior of L2 German learners revealed that they are sensitive to both lexical (synonyms) and syntactic (active/passive alternation) substitutions during a second reading of the texts, while L1 showed only a reduced sensitivity to lexical substitutions.

Overall, our results suggest that less proficient readers retain more details of linguistic surface information during reading.

The results provide important evidence consistent with several current processing theories (e.g., the Shallow(e.g., Shallow Structure Hypothesis), acquisition (Declarative/Procedural Model), and cognitive (e.g., Fuzzy Trace Theory) approaches, adding a new dimension to their empirical and to their empirical and theoretical foundations.

Bordag D, Opitz A, Polter M, Meng M (2021). Non-native Readers Are More Sensitive to Changes in Surface Linguistic Information than Native Readers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 24, 599–611. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1366728920000772