Understanding the cognitive processes of L1 and L2 reading with different approaches

Dr. Lin Chen (Illinois Educational Psychology; Pitt LRDC)

Reading is essential in enabling individuals to develop their knowledge, opportunities, and full potential. Reading comprehension is an incremental process which occurs as the reader builds and updates a mental representation of the meaning conveyed in text. These continuous incremental processes occur in both first (L1) and second language (L2) reading and present unique challenges faced by readers with reading difficulties and readers for whom English is a second language. In this talk, I introduce multiple studies that examine these fundamental processes in English native speakers, comparing them to those present in L2 learners from a variety of L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Spanish, and Korean) as they read authentic materials from the New York Times. By combining behavioral measures, ERPs, and probabilistic language models (such as probabilistic context free grammar, PCFG), we find that the incremental reading processes of L1 and proficient L2 readers are generally influenced by the same lexical and syntactic factors and show similar time courses for lexical and syntactic processes. However, differing weights of lexical and syntactic factors emerge, suggesting quantitative differences between L1 and L2 readers and among readers whose L1 backgrounds vary in their similarity with English in both language and writing system. These differences arise from variabilities in the quality of readers’ lexical and syntactic representations in the target language and are further affected by the similarities between L1 and L2 languages and writing systems. Based on those theoretical explorations and empirical findings, I discuss applications for reading instruction.