Psycholinguists from the Center for Language and Brain at the Higher School of Economics, together with colleagues from the City University of New York and the University of Stuttgart, found out how reading in Russian differs in different groups of readers. To do this, for the first time, they used a new method for bilingualism to compare eye movements of adult Russian speakers, Russian-speaking children, and adult bilinguals with different levels of Russian language proficiency. The research results are published in the Reading Research Quarterly.
A total of 120 readers took part in the study, 30 people in each group: adult native speakers of the Russian language, students of the second grades of secondary schools in Russia, students of American universities studying Russian as a foreign language (RFL), and finally, the “heirs” of the Russian language. The latter group included bilinguals who were either born into a Russian-speaking family in the United States, or emigrated from Russian-speaking countries at an early age with their family. Thus, Russian for them is an “inherited” native language, but in most cases it ceases to be dominant as they grow up, when children are actively learning a new language of the environment (English). All participants read the same simple sentences in Russian (for example, “Andrey bought milk, sour cream, cottage cheese in a store”), while their eye movements were recorded with a video oculograph.
It turned out that each of the groups of participants has a characteristic pattern, or “drawing”, of reading. For example, adult Russian speakers follow a “fluent” pattern: they read quickly (2 seconds per sentence), make short notes on words (290 ms), rarely reread them, and often skip them (17% of all words in a sentence). Scientists suggest that it is this pattern that characterizes the process of reading “effortlessly”: adult native speakers have no difficulties in visual recognition of words or in processing the grammatical structure of a sentence.
A completely different picture emerges when considering reading patterns in second graders. Children read sentences longer (6 seconds), make longer commitments (690 ms), reread words more often and skip them much less often (9%). Researchers have defined this pattern as “medium” or “intermediate”. Following findings from previous studies of children’s reading, the researchers suggest that the middle pattern is indicative of the difficulties that children experience at the local lexical level, namely, that novice readers are not as effective at decoding letters into sounds as adults. Such inefficiency makes it difficult to visually recognize the word and, as a result, slows down the lexical access to the child’s “mental vocabulary” (that is, the connection between the written word and its oral representation).
The cluster analysis, which the authors of the article used to compare the reading patterns, showed that the “heirs” with a higher level of Russian language proficiency also read according to the intermediate pattern. However, RFL students and “heirs” with a low level of language read, following a third, beginner pattern. This pattern is characterized by the longest fixations on words (1054 ms) and, accordingly, the longest time for reading a sentence (14 seconds), rereading words, and a very low percentage of missing words (6%).
The main difference between a beginner pattern is to reread large parts of a sentence or the entire sentence two or more times (up to five to six times in some cases). According to the researchers, such a pattern signals not only local difficulties in lexical access, but also global problems with reading comprehension, namely, the general integration of information and the perception of the grammatical structure of a sentence.
“The early assimilation of the Russian language by bilingual heirs, and they learn Russian from birth, like native speakers, did not affect the development of reading skills in Russian. Even advanced heirs read on a par with children of eight or nine years old, ”explains Olga Parshina, a researcher at the Center for Language and Brain.
As the authors of the article note, belonging to one or another group of readers did not always mean following a single reading pattern. Thus, many children and “heirs” (and sometimes students of RFL) read sentences following different patterns, which indicates the possibility of readers switching from one process to another.
“We plan to continue the study of linguistic and individual factors influencing the process of such switching, perhaps in the future this will allow teachers to speed up the process of switching when teaching reading,” comments Anastasia Lopukhina, a researcher at the Center for Language and Brain.
Used materials from the article “Monolingual and Bilingual Reading Processes in Russian: An Exploratory Scanpath Analysis”; Olga Parshina, Irina A. Sekerina, Anastasiya Lopukhina, Titus von der Malsburg; Reading Research Quarterly, June 2021
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