Is Direction-Specific Reading Experience Transferrable Across Orthographies? Eye Tracking Evidence from Chinese-Japanese Bilinguals

Purpose Writing systems adopt different directions of texts. While most scripts are written exclusively horizontally rightwards, other text orientations can also be found. In some rare cases such as Japanese, texts can be written horizontally and vertically, offering a unique opportunity to investigate cognitive processes in different reading directions. How readers’ direction-specific reading and perceptual experiences in their first-language influence their second-language reading remains to be explored.Method The present study recruited native Chinese university students (n = 65, mean age = 22.1, 47 females and 18 males), who were accustomed only to horizontal texts, and tested their eye movements during the reading of Japanese sentences printed in horizontal and vertical directions. In addition, their Japanese language proficiency was evaluated in an offline test.Results The readers showed an overall higher efficiency when reading horizontally than when reading vertically. However, with an increase of Japanese proficiency, they demonstrated a faster development trend in eye movements for vertical reading than for horizontal.Conclusion Direction-specific reading and perceptual experience, beyond vocabulary knowledge, is another factor to determine reading efficiency. Such experience is transferrable across orthographies, suggesting that the first language environment plays a critical role in second-language acquisition.