Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Reader 1

Mary Paster

Reader 2

Megan Zirnstein

Rights Information

2024 Momoka J. Schmidt

Abstract

The present paper investigated the influence of local and global context on lexical prediction effects during online sentence processing for monolingual and bilingual participants. In the present experiment, nine participants for whom English is a non-dominant second language read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Monolingual participant data from an eye-tracking study by Zirnstein was also explored. Both experiments utilized total mean reading times of critical words as a measure of processing difficulty. In the monolingual data, local context (sentence condition) had a significant effect on the total reading times in the predictive and neutral global contexts; this effect was not significant in the unpredictive global context. The bilingual experiment showed similar patterns, with notable processing benefits from predictive sentences and slight processing costs from unpredictive sentences in the predictive and neutral global contexts, suggesting that bilinguals are able to form and validate predictions when reading in a second language, like monolinguals reading in their native language. Also similarly to the monolingual participants, bilingual participants read all sentence conditions at similar speeds in the unpredictive global context, suggesting they too strategically modulated prediction processes. In this context, monolingual participants still seemed to experience prediction benefits and costs, though not to a statistically significant extent, while the bilingual participants’ reading times showed little to no processing costs. Bilinguals therefore seem to be more sensitive to global context than monolinguals, in order to conserve cognitive resources during a complex task such as reading in a second language. Future research is necessary to explore whether such differences in prediction processes are specific to reading in a second language, or if this effect might be explained by a more overarching difference in bilingual language or domain-general cognitive processes.

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