L1 effects on the processing of L2 compounds: an eye-tracking study

Using eye movements, the present study examined how L1 Arabic/L2 English participants processed three types of lexical items: morphologically congruent (compound both in English and Arabic), morphologically incongruent (compound in English but monomorphemic words in Arabic), and control (monomorphemic in English and Arabic). In total, 55 L2 English speakers and 51 L1 English speakers (baseline) read short sentences containing one of the three item types (18 triplets in total) as their eye-movements were recorded. They then took a vocabulary test as a measure of lexical L2 proficiency. L1 speakers did not show significant differences between the three types of stimuli in the early or late eye-tracking measures. Lower, but not higher, proficiency L2 speakers showed a processing disadvantage for both morphologically congruent and incongruent items relative to controls. However, for the total reading time measure, only morphologically congruent items were read more slowly than control items by the lower proficiency participants.