Eye-Tracking Based L2 Detection: Universal and Specific Eye Movement Patterns in L1 and L2 Reading

摘要

The native (L1) and foreign (L2) languages a person speaks are an important constituent part of their individual profile. This study explores the potential of eye tracking as a diagnostic tool that allows to reliably identify reader non-nativeness in L1 and L2 text reading. The eye movements of native Russian-speaking students with above-average proficiency in both the languages were tracked while they were reading L1 and L2 texts. For selected measurement types such as average fixation duration, some general distributional patterns were confirmed. However, L2 reading also evidenced some distinct features compared to L1 performance, despite the readers’ high proficiency in both the languages. The distributional patterns for fixations and saccades in L1 and L2 reading can be informative to optimize adaptive thresholding algorithms of eye tracking based non-nativeness detection.