Naturalistic Reading in the L2 and the Impact of Word Frequency and Cross-Linguistic Similarity

お茶の水女子大学英文学会研究報告While psycholinguistic studies of first language (L1) reading have identified multiple factors that predict the speed of lexical access, there are few studies investigating whether such factors influence second language (L2) reading. For usage-based models of acquisition and processing, two lexical factors that are believed to be crucial in L2 reading are word frequency and cross-linguistic similarity. No previous studies, however, have looked at these factors during naturalistic reading tasks when readers’ L1 and L2 differ in script. In this study, we monitored the eye movements of Japanese speakers of English while they read a short story. We used linear mixed effects modelling to investigate the role of word frequency and cross-linguistic similarity, as well as other factors such as language proficiency, on L2 lexical access. Word frequency was a strong predictor of word reading speed. A cross-linguistic measure of phonological similarity was not significant, indicating that even if lexical representations in the L1 were activated during L2 reading, this activation did not influence reading speed. The findings are discussed in terms of a localist connectionist model of word recognition