Eye-tracking study reveals high semantic constraint speeds interlingual homograph processing in bilinguals, indicating contextual cues mitigate cross-language ambiguity.
Key Points
Investigate how late Spanish–English bilinguals process interlingual homographs across varying sentence semantic constraints and manage parallel activation.
Recorded eye movements of 19 late bilingual speakers of L1 Spanish and L2 English reading sentences with English–Spanish interlingual homographs in high- and low-constraint contexts.
Conducted stimulated recall interviews prompted by eye-movement recordings, analyzing reading behavior via linear mixed-effects models and interview transcripts via thematic content analysis.
High-semantic-constraint contexts facilitated faster and more efficient processing of interlingual homographs.
Low-semantic-constraint contexts elicited longer reading times and increased rereading, with qualitative reports highlighting conscious awareness of parallel activation and strategic context monitoring.