Anticipatory and Locally Coherent Lexical Activation Varies as a Function of Language Proficiency

Interpreting sentences spoken in a second language can be demanding and plagued with uncertainty, especially for lower proficiency listeners. While native language listeners use numerous information sources to anticipate upcoming words accurately, the pattern of anticipation may be different for second language users. We explore this issue in bilinguals with varying English proficiency by recording anticipatory eyemovements as participants listened to sentences (e.g., “The pirate chases the ship”) for which the object and three distractors (agent-related, action-related, unrelated) appeared in the concurrently presented images. Higher proficiency participants were faster than lower proficiency participants. Fixations to action-related distractors after onset of the action also varied by proficiency, with lower proficiency participants showing greater tendency to fixate this locally coherent actionrelated distractor. This final effect is supported by a trial level analysis, but appears to be unrelated to the effect of proficiency on anticipation speed.