The eyes cannot lie. Eye movements are biological data that reveal information about the reader's attention and cognitive processes. This article summarizes the century-old eye movement research to elucidate reading comprehension performances and more importantly, their implications for reading instruction. This review paper addresses three…

Prediction is one characteristic of the human mind. But what does it mean to say the mind is a "prediction machine" and "inherently forward looking" as is frequently claimed? In natural languages, many contexts are not easily predictable in a forward fashion. In English, for example, many frequent verbs do not carry unique…

In this study, we examined the effect of previewing unfamiliar vocabulary on the real-time reading behavior of first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers. University students with English as their L1 or L2 read passages with embedded pseudowords. In a within-participant manipulation, definitions of the pseudowords were either previewed…

When we read, errors in oculomotor programming can cause the eyes to land and fixate on different words from what the mind intended. Previous work suggests that these "mislocated fixations" form 10-30% of first-pass fixations in reading eye movement data, which presents theoretical and analytic issues for eyetracking-while-reading…

Past work has suggested that L1 readers retrieve idioms (i.e., "spill the tea") directly vs. matched literal controls ("drink the tea") following unbiased contexts, whereas L2 readers process idioms more compositionally. However, it is unclear whether this occurs when a figuratively or literally biased context…

While it is possible to express the same meaning in different ways ('bread and butter' versus 'butter and bread'), we tend to say things in the same way. As much as half of spoken discourse is made up of "formulaic language" or linguistic patterns. Despite its prevalence, little is known about how the processing system treats novel…

The aim of this project was to identify factors contributing to cross-language semantic preview benefits. In Experiment 1, Russian-English bilinguals read English sentences with Russian words presented as parafoveal previews. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to present sentences. Critical previews were cognate translations of the…

An important question within psycholinguistics is how knowledge of multiple languages impacts the coactivation of word forms and meanings during language comprehension. To the extent that a bilingual's known languages are always partially active, as predicted by models such as the bilingual interactive activation plus model (Dijkstra & Van…

Skilled hearing readers activate phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations in order to recognize and comprehend words. However, deaf readers may achieve reading comprehension by different means. More specifically, enhanced visual attention, reduced access to phonology, and bimodal bilingualism may influence how deaf readers…

Reading in difficult or novel fonts results in slower and less efficient reading (Slattery & Rayner, 2010); however, these fonts may also lead to better learning and memory (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011). This effect is consistent with a desirable difficulty effect such that more effort during encoding results in better…

I investigated the trajectory of processing variability, as measured by coefficient of variation (CV), using an intentional word learning experiment and reanalyzing published eye-tracking data of an incidental word learning study (Elgort et al., 2018). In the word learning experiment, native English speakers (N = 35) studied Swahili-English word…

Naturalistic language learning is contextually grounded. When people learn their first (L1) and often their second (L2) language, they do so in various contexts. In this dissertation I examine the effect of various contexts on language development. Part 1 describes the effects of textual, linguistic context in reading. I employed an eye-tracking…

In this study, we investigated developmental aspects of eye movements during reading of three languages (English, German, and Finnish) that vary widely in their orthographic complexity and predictability. Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules are rather complex in English and German but relatively simple in Finnish. Despite their differences in…

The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of English-French interlingual homophone pairs (e.g., "mow"; French homophone…

Theories of preview benefit in reading hinge on integration across saccades and the idea that preview benefit is greater the more similar the preview and target are. Schotter (2013) reported preview benefit from a synonymous preview, but it is unclear whether this effect occurs because of similarity between the preview and target (i.e.,…