Despite increasing college enrollment, degree completion rates for Latino students lags significantly behind those of Caucasian students. An important barrier to college completion is the need for reading remediation. The goal of this study is to examine the cognitive processes that underlie adult bilingual reading through the use of eye- movement monitoring technology.
The specific aim of this research is to examine how bilingual reading is influenced by the coactivation of two languages. This study will look specifically at how the selection of the appropriate meanings of words in sentence context is influenced by the activation of competing representations from the non-target language. The eye-movements of college-aged bilinguals will be recorded as they read English sentences on a computer screen. These sentences will contain words that have more than one meaning, and are therefore ambiguous (e.g., novel, fast). Half of these ambiguous words will be cognates with Spanish (they will have similar spelling and meaning such as novel/novela), and half will not be cognates (e.g., fast). Eye- movements for these different types of ambiguous words will be compared. Any observed differences would suggest that bilingual readers coactivate meanings from both of their languages when understanding ambiguous words.
This research will provide the foundational knowledge necessary for the design of effective reading interventions that are responsive to the unique cross-language dynamics of adult bilingual reading. This research will also contribute to basic research on reading, which has historically emphasized monolingual reading. This will allow the field to better address the needs of second language readers.
