Universidade Federal do Ceará
Laboratório de Fonética e Multilinguismo (LabFoM)

Online Seminars in Psycholinguistics

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Thursday, October 8, 1 pm (Brasilia time)

Findings from GECO: The Ghent Eye-tracking Corpus of Monolinguals and Bilinguals Reading an Entire Novel

Denis Drieghe

University of Southampton, UK

Up until recently, models of eye movements during reading almost exclusively focused on monolingual reading, even though most people are bilinguals. Relatively few studies examined eye movements in bilinguals and even less had a focus on sentence processing. Those few studies that did look at reading in a second language (L2) examined eye movements on a single embedded target word without taking into account changes in global eye movement behaviour that L2 reading might entail. In my talk I will present GECO (Ghent Eye-tracking COrpus), the freely available monolingual (English) and bilingual (Dutch- English) eye-tracking corpus of participants reading a complete novel (56,000 words). The aim of this project is to establish a more comprehensive description of eye movement behaviour in bilingual reading. We collected this large-scale data corpus from 14 English monolinguals and 19 Dutch (L1)/ English (L2) unbalanced bilinguals of intermediate to high L2 proficiency who read the entire novel while their eye movements were being tracked (Bilinguals read half in Dutch, half in English). In this talk, I will present descriptive statistics of reading time measures for first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading. I will also present analyses of frequency, neighbourhood size and cognate effects for L1 and L2 sentence reading. 

Bio:

Denis Drieghe joined the Psychology Department of the University of Southampton (UK) in 2009. He is an Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology, and his research involves recording eye movements to examine cognitive processing during reading. He received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from Ghent University in Belgium working with Marc Brysbaert where he also obtained his BSc and MSc (named ‘licenciaat’ at the time). He obtained consecutive positions as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow from the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders for a total of 5 years. During his time in Ghent, he also obtained multiple grants to go abroad for research visits. Spread over three separate visits, he spent a total of 2.5 years working with Keith Rayner and Sandy Pollatsek at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA (USA). He was a visiting research fellow at the University of Southampton working with Simon Liversedge before taking on a lectureship in the Psychology department in 2010. Denis is an Associate Editor for Behavior Research Methods (since 2020) and Psychologica Belgica (since 2014). His research has been funded by the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders, the Leverhulme Trust, the Experimental Psychological Society and the Australian Research Council.

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/psychology/about/staff/dd1f08.page

Suggested readings for the talk:

Cop, U., Dirix, N., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (2017). Presenting GECO: An eye-tracking corpus of monolingual and bilingual sentence reading. Behavior Research Methods, 49, 602 – 615.

Cop, U., Dirix, N., Van Assche, E., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (2017). Reading a book in one or two languages? An eye movement study of cognate facilitation in L1 and L2 Reading. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 747 – 769.

Dirix, N., Cop, U., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (2017). Cross-lingual neighborhood effects in generalised lexical decision and natural reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 43, 887 – 915.

Cop, U., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (2015). Comparison of monolingual and bilingual reading of a novel. PLoS One, 10, e0134008.

Cop, U., Keuleers, E., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (2015). Frequency effects in monolingual and bilingual natural reading. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22, 1216 – 1234.