Eye movement parameters of bilingual people in reading Latvian and Russian

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Eye movement parameters of bilingual people in
reading Latvian and Russian

• Irina Gorshanova, Roberts Paeglis, Ivars
  LacisDepartment of Optometry and Vision Science
• University of Latvia

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• The main purpose of this research is determining
  the eye movement parameters that distinguish
  bilingual people while reading texts in two
  alphabetic systems (Latvian and Russian)

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• The term multilingualism can refer to phenomena
  regarding an individual speaker who uses two or
  more languages, a community of speakers where two
  or more languages are used, or between speakers
  of different languages.

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• More specifically, the terms bilingual and
  trilingual are used to describe comparable
  situations in which two or three languages are
  involved, respectively.

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• A simultaneous bilingual advanced from speaking
  no languages at all directly to speaking two
  languages
• Successive bilingualism refers to the learning of
  one language after already knowing another
• Receptive bilingualism implies that a person is
  able to understand two languages but expresses
  oneself in only one language

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Eye movement parameters

• gaze fixations or stops
• saccades or eye jumps
• regressions or returns to previously read words

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• Typically for reading, fixations last for about
  300 milliseconds.This information is used by the
  brain to plan eye movements to the next positions
  

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• Eye jumps can reach up to 700 degrees per second

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hypotheses

• These parameters can be different for reading in
  the two languages spoken in Latvia

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• The equipment used for the research is the
  video-oculograph iViewX, which calculates the
  gaze position from the infra-red corneal reflex
  and the pupil dark area.

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Method

• In this experiment texts from history and
  geography school-books are used. Currently these
  books are translated one to one from Latvian into
  Russian.

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• We hypothesize that the perception of study
  texts may differ in both languages, because the
  syntax, semantics and phonetics are not similar.
  Therefore we question if the school-books should
  rather be adapted.

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Results
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