What the eyes tell us about bilingual language processing in the linguistically diverse city of Montreal

Prof. Debra Titone (McGill University)

Eye movement investigations have long been crucial for building a comprehensive understanding of the cognitive and perceptual processes that support reading and other language processes because of their naturalness and great temporal precision (reviewed in Whitford, Pivneva, & Titone, 2015; Titone, Whitford, Lijewska, & Itzhak, 2016). Indeed, most of what we know about psycholinguistics has been deeply informed by eye movement reading data, including the fundamentals of word processing, contextual effects, grammatical interpretation, and higher-level aspects of language such as figurative or emotional effects on language.

Of relevance here, much of this work has historically treated all bilinguals as the same, and has less frequently investigated how individual differences among bilinguals in language experience, or potentially language environment, impact processing. In this talk, I present some of the work from my laboratory that has used eye movement measures to study individual differences in bilingual reading in different populations. These populations include healthy bilingual younger adults, but also include bilingual older adults.  Much of this work focusses on the interplay between local word-level processing and more global influences of sentence context, such as what arises from variations in sentential constraint or the interpretive demands of emotional language, though more recent work has examined eye movement measures of what people notice when they view images taken from the linguistic landscape of Montreal (Vingron, Gullifer, Hamill, Leimgruber, & Titone, 2017; Leimgruber, Vingron, & Titone, in press).

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