Using eye-movement data to investigate lexical and syntactic processing in L2 and L3 learning
Carolina Bernales, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
Over the last decade, online methods, such as eye-tracking, have been increasingly used to investigate issues concerning the learner’s underlying knowledge and cognitive processes during L2 processing in real time (Bello & Bernales, 2019). In general, in eye tracking research it is assumed that increased processing times signal processing difficulties and are taken as a measure of the cognitive effort required to process specific stimuli (Just & Carpenter, 1980: Rayner, 1998, 2009). However, despite this broad consensus on the link between eye-movements and the allocation of attentional resources, the interpretation of eye-movement data is not always clear-cut when factors related to the strategies used by readers are not considered in the analysis (Godfroid, 2020: Wang & Pellicer-Sanchez, 2023), because it is not possible to infer processing strategies and subprocess from eye-movement data exclusively. In this talk, I will discuss my research combining eye-tracking data and offline methods to investigate current issues in L2 and L3 lexical and syntactic processing.
Bio:
Carolina Bernales is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in Chile. She is also the Chief Editor of the academic journal Signos, Estudios de Lingüística.
Dr. Bernales completed a Master’s degree in English/Applied English Linguistics and a PhD in Second Language Acquisition, (major in English Linguistics) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Language Science program at UW in collaboration with Dr. Jacee Cho.
Her research focuses on the processes involved in lexical and syntactic processing, and reading comprehension in L2 and L3, issues that she has explored using online and offline techniques.