Over the last few decades, linguistic gender-fair forms have become increasingly used by individuals and official institutions. In the French-speaking sphere, this has led to heated discussions among politicians and other stakeholders, some of whom claim that these forms render texts illegible and inaccessible to the general public. However, the processing of gender-fair forms in reading has been the topic of a few empirical studies. In the present paper, we add to this small body of research by reporting results from a pre-registered eye-tracking study where 58 native French-speakers read short texts which included a masculine form (voisins), complete double form (voisines et voisins), or contracted double form (voisin·es). Consistent with previous findings, the complete double forms were not more costly to process. In contrast, contracted double forms led to increased processing costs in intermediate and late stages of processing, but had no effect on the early stages of processing. Our data also indicate that the processing of contracted double forms becomes easier over time, and that it is facilitated by positive attitudes towards gender-fair language. These findings provide important insights that enlighten the current debate and should therefore be considered in the elaboration of official guidelines regarding gender-fair language.

Cross-language figurative meaning activation in idiom processing has been observed in primed lexical and semantic decision tasks, but not in text reading. To study first-language figurative idiom meaning activation in second-language reading, we created and tested a novel contextual idiom-priming paradigm and conducted an eye-tracking experiment with Chinese–English immersion and non-immersion bilinguals, and English-speaking controls. Three counterbalanced conditions were created: in English texts, the meaning probe was preceded by a close or paraphrased translation of a related Chinese-only idiom, or an unrelated phrase. The processing of the probe was influenced by figurative meanings of Chinese-only idioms for both groups of bilinguals, but not for monolingual controls, evidencing non-selective language processing beyond single words. There was no difference in the patterns of activation between close and paraphrased translations, suggesting that exact lexical overlap may not be necessary for cross-language activation of idioms. Different processing patterns were observed for immersion and non-immersion bilinguals.

This study investigates the reading of novel morpho-syntactic forms, specifically gender-inclusive writing in French. Inclusive writing aims to address the generic use of the masculine form, which often encourages male mental representations over female or non-binary ones. The study focuses on contracted forms using the mid-dot, such as étudiant·e·s, which have become widespread in French despite ongoing public debate. Four experiments using eye-tracking and self-paced reading methods compared reading times for inclusive, masculine, and feminine forms. Experiment 1 found no robust difference in reading times between inclusive forms ending in “·e” and their feminine counterparts, suggesting familiarity with this form. Experiment 2 showed that inclusive forms ending in “·ne”, such as comédien·ne·s, were read more slowly than their feminine counterparts, possibly due to phonological effects. Experiment 3 tested highly pronounceable inclusive forms like auteur·rice·s, which were read more slowly initially, but this effect was short-lasting. Experiment 4 compared more or less pronounceable forms, such as chanteur·euse·s and chanteur·se·s, respectively, confirming that the degree of pronounceability affects reading times. Overall, the study concluded that the reading time for contracted inclusive forms depends on familiarity and the degree of pronounceability.

Previous research has demonstrated that predictable words that are not presented linger in memory and lead to false recognition in subsequent memory tests. However, little is known about these effects among second language learners, a population that is known for engaging less in prediction. Here, we used a self-paced reading and word recognition memory test to examine encoding differences and subsequent memory effects in groups of L1 and L2 speakers of German. For initial reading, results showed no group differences in the size of the predictability effect, possibly because group differences in attention allocation during reading masked predictability effects. For recognition memory, L2 learners showed reduced rates of false remembering for predictable words (after correcting for response bias), and they were also less likely to false-alarm to predictable words with high subjective memory confidence, similar to L1 speakers. In addition, L2 learners showed reduced recognition memory for previously presented words. Taken together, these results are consistent with models arguing that lexical-semantic entries are less firmly represented in the L2 lexicon, which in turn lowers pre-activation of predictable referents during L2 sentence processing and leads to the formation of less distinct memory representations for previously encoded information.

This study examined how word identification is influenced by interword spacing and morphological complexity in Thai, a script without interword spacing. While previous research supported the facilitative effect of interword spacing on Thai word identification, they did not account for the potential effects of the words’ morphological structure. The challenge of word identification becomes more pronounced when readers have to identify compound words (e.g., bathroom) when reading sentences without interword spacing. In an eye-tracking experiment that manipulated interword spacing (unspaced, spaced) and noun type (bimorphemic compound, monomorphemic) in Thai sentences, we confirmed previous findings that interword spacing has a facilitative effect on word identification, as evidenced by shorter first fixation duration, gaze duration and total fixation time. Furthermore, we observed an interaction effect indicating that interword spacing had a larger facilitative effect on the identification of compounds compared to monomorphemic words. Our results also revealed that the morphological structure of Thai words can influence saccadic movements, e.g., the first fixation landing position was closer to the beginning of compounds than to simple words. We suggest that the orthography-language interface, a language-specific feature, should be considered a major component in eye movement models of reading.

Word processing during reading is known to be influenced by lexical features, especially word length, frequency, and predictability. This study examined the relative importance of these features in word processing during second language (L2) English reading. We used data from an eye-tracking corpus and applied a machine-learning approach to model word-level eye-tracking measures and identify key predictors. Predictors comprised several lexical features, including length, frequency, and predictability (e.g., surprisal). Additionally, sentence, passage, and reader characteristics were considered for comparison. The analysis found that word length was the most important variable across several eye-tracking measures. However, for certain measures, word frequency and predictability were more important than length, and in some cases, reader characteristics such as proficiency were more significant than lexical features. These findings highlight the complexity of word processing during reading, the shared processes between first language (L1) and L2 reading, and their potential to refine models of eye-movement control.

Word age of acquisition (AoA) influences many aspects of language processing, including reading. However, reading studies of word AoA effects have almost exclusively focused on monolingual young adults, leaving their influence in other age and language groups little understood. Here, we investigated how age (childhood, young adulthood) and language background (monolingual, bilingual) influence word AoA effects during first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading. Using eye-tracking, we observed larger L1 word AoA effects in children versus adults (across both language backgrounds). Moreover, we observed larger L2 versus L1 word AoA effects in bilinguals (across both ages), with some evidence of heightened effects in bilingual adults (for late-stage reading only). Taken together, our findings suggest that word AoA exerts a stronger influence on reading during conditions of reduced lexical entrenchment, offering critical insights into how both developing and bilingual readers acquire and maintain word representations across their known languages.

Line breaks are ubiquitous in continuous text, as in this article. Despite this prevalence, their effects on parsing and interpretation have been markedly understudied in previous research on written language processing. To shed light on these effects, we conducted a self-paced reading and an eye-tracking study in which participants read multiline texts that contained direct object–subject ambiguity, a type of temporary clause boundary ambiguity. Within these texts, we manipulated the placement of line breaks so that they either regularly coincided or clashed with clause boundaries. We hypothesised that this manipulation would cause readers to adjust their parsing strategies and interpretative commitments. Results revealed that the way in which text is segmented through line breaks can significantly affect how readers parse syntactically ambiguous structures. While coinciding line breaks and clause boundaries helped readers arrive at the correct analysis of the ambiguous structures, cases of line break and clause boundary clash led readers down the garden path during online processing, and in some cases also impacted their comprehension. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the importance of text segmentation in real-world settings, such as books, educational material and digital content.