Based on the simple view of reading (SVR), we investigated factors associated with reading comprehension in Second Language (L2) minority children learning a highly consistent orthography through a network analysis. Bilingual and monolingual children participated in the research. Consistent with prior findings, reading speed supported reading comprehension for L1 learners, whereas, for L2 learners, correct decoding carried greater weight than reading speed. In monolingual children, vocabulary and morphosyntactic comprehension contributed jointly and independently to reading comprehension success. However, only vocabulary facilitated reading comprehension in bilingual children, with morphosyntactic skills showing no influence. While monolinguals benefitted from a rich vocabulary and good morphosyntactic knowledge for reading speed and accuracy, in bilingual children, only L2 reading speed was affected by linguistic skills.

This paper reports an expansion of the English as a second language (L2) component of the Multilingual Eye Movement Corpus (MECO L2), an international database of eye movements during text reading. While the previous Wave 1 of the MECO project (Kuperman et al., 2023) contained English as a L2 reading data from readers with 12 different first language (L1) backgrounds, the newly collected dataset adds eye-tracking data on English text reading from 13 distinct L1 backgrounds (N = 660) as well as participants’ scores on component skills of English proficiency and information about their demographics and language background and use. The paper reports reliability estimates, descriptive statistics, and correlational analyses as means to validate the expansion dataset. Consistent with prior literature and the MECO Wave 1, trends in the MECO Wave 2 data include a weak correlation between reading comprehension and oculomotor measures of reading fluency and a greater L1-L2 contrast in reading fluency than reading comprehension. Jointly with Wave 1, the MECO project includes English reading data from more than 1,200 readers representing a diversity of native writing systems (logographic, abjad, abugida, and alphabetic) and 19 distinct L1 backgrounds. We provide multiple pointers to new venues of how L2 reading researchers can mine this rich publicly available dataset.

Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, children read ironic and literal sentences embedded in stories while their eye movements were recorded. Next, the training group was taught about irony, and the control group was taught about reading comprehension. At post-test, the reading task and eye-tracking were repeated. Irony comprehension improved after metapragmatic training on irony, suggesting that metapragmatic knowledge serves an important role in irony development. However, the eye movement data suggested that training did not change the strategy children used to resolve the ironic meaning. The results highlight the potential of metapragmatic training and have implications for theories of irony comprehension.

The proactive gain control hypothesis suggests that the global language context regulates lexical access to the bilinguals’ languages during reading. Specifically, with increasing exposure to non-target language cues, bilinguals adjust the lexical activation to allow non-target language access from the earliest word recognition stages. Using the invisible boundary paradigm, we examined the flow of lexical activation in 50 proficient Russian-English bilinguals reading in their native Russian while the language context shifted from a monolingual to a bilingual environment. We gradually introduced non-target language cues (the language of experimenter and fillers) while also manipulating the type of word previews (identical, code-switches, unrelated code-switches, pseudowords). The results revealed the facilitatory reading effects of code-switches but only in the later lexical processing stages and these effects were independent of the global language context manipulation. The results are discussed from the perspective of limitations imposed by script differences on bilingual language control flexibility.

Liechty, Pieters, and Wedel (2003) report an eye-tracking experiment that is taken to support the distinction between two states of covert visual attention: local versus global. We discuss several logical problems with this dichotomy and their experiment, and then provide an alternate account of their data using a model, E-Z Reader, that requires only a single attention state.

How do children with developmental dyslexia process unattested or ill-formed phonological sequences in their native language? This question warrants attention because these children are primarily characterized by a phonological deficit. In this study, we support the hypothesis that intact phonological grammar allows segmenting and recognizing (pseudo)words through sensitivity to sonority markedness constraints. We administered a lexical decision task in silent reading to 21 French children with developmental dyslexia, comparing them with 21 chronological age-matched and 21 reading level-matched peers. Children were presented with words and pseudowords that either respected or transgressed syllable boundaries (⟨ar*gent⟩, money vs. ⟨a*rgent⟩ vs. ⟨arg*ent⟩). For pseudowords, we manipulated the sonority profiles of unattested intervocalic ⟨C1C2⟩ clusters from unmarked, well-formed (⟨rj⟩ in ⟨yrjyde⟩; high-fall) to marked, ill-formed clusters (⟨vl⟩ in ⟨uvlyde⟩; high-rise). Results confirmed preferences for syllable segmentation in words (⟨ar*gent⟩ is preferred to ⟨a*rgent⟩ or ⟨arg*ent⟩) regardless of distributional properties. We found a sonority projection effect that illustrated a gradient-based preference for sonority markedness constraints with pseudowords. However, pseudowords conforming to expected sonority-based segmentation (⟨yr*jyde⟩ or ⟨u*vlyde⟩) were more difficult to reject, possibly due to interferences from lexical attestedness. We discuss a phonological deficit that does not stem from degraded language-specific or universal phonological representations.

This article offers small-scale research findings on the impact of narrative contextual clues as a form of scaffolding in Year 9 Latin lessons. The students of this research learned Latin via the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) (CSCP, 1998), which provides teachers and students with meaningful Latin in the form of interconnected stories (Hunt, 2016, 88). As Nuttall has argued, teaching students to read interconnected sentences and appreciate a text's meaning and overall message is what separates the act of reading from parsing vocabulary and grammatical structures (Nuttall, 1996, 2–3). Therefore, while the stories of the CLC can be read as isolated entities, the act of reading requires students to consider the overarching narratives of the stories. Furthermore, as students become confident in their Latin proficiency, it is possible to predict what is going to happen in a story just by thinking about what occurred in the previous line. For example, the first CLC story famously opens with the line Caecilius est in tablino (Caecilius is in the study). We can therefore predict that the story could take place in a Roman house and feature different rooms. Of course, this is exactly what happens in the story. This article focuses on the value of contextual clues in guiding students' predictions and promoting them to read rather than merely parse sentences. Ultimately, I argue that contextual clues, which can easily be overlooked as a form of scaffolding, serve as an invaluable aid for students when reading whole pages of Latin.

Neural tuning for visual words is essential for fluent reading across various scripts. This study investigated the emergence and development of N170 tuning for Chinese characters and its cognitive–linguistic correlates. Electroencephalogram data from 48 adult L2 learners and 23 native Chinese readers were collected using a color detection task. The N170 for real characters, pseudo-characters, false characters, stroke combinations and line drawings were recorded. We found beginner adult L2 learners showed larger N170 Chinese characters compared to stroke combinations (coarse neural tuning). The intermediate-level L2 Chinese learners demonstrated fine-tuning for Chinese orthographic regularities. Importantly, a clear shift from bilateral to left-lateralized coarse and fine-tuning for print was observed from beginner to intermediate L2 learners as their Chinese reading experience increased. Moreover, individual differences in neural print tuning moderately correlated with word-reading fluency, Chinese vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness.

This article reconsiders the classed and gendered construction of the Author in the Roman Mediterranean, a construction that generates the intertwined notions of authorship and authenticity. Modern scholarly conversations about authorship and pseudepigraphy in the Roman Mediterranean often proceed from the uninterrogated assumptions that (a) ancient texts (including early Christian texts) were the monographic products of solitary authors and (b) everyone in antiquity, regardless of gender or class, had access to the status of being an ‘Author’. While conversations about (in)authentic textual production extend beyond the works that become part of the New Testament, these twin assumptions form the basis for modern debates about ‘forgery’ in New Testament literature. This article challenges both assumptions by first surveying the role of uncredited collaboration in Roman literary culture and then analysing ancient Christian discourses surrounding (a) illicit textual meddling and (b) inappropriate textual ascription. These two discursive categories reveal how the categories of class and gender are entangled with early Christian ideas of the Author. Ancient discourses of authenticity and authorship were not simply about who produced texts but about policing which acts of textual production count as ‘authoring’.