The impact of second-language experience on bilingual reading across the adult life-span
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reading, like many other acquired skills, is developed and refined through extensive formal instruction and practice. However, bilinguals, by virtue of knowing and using two or more languages, necessarily have less first- (L1) and second-language (L2) reading experience than monolinguals who, by definition, read in one language exclusively. Thus, an important question for the study of bilingualism and language generally is how changes in L2 experience affect reading in both the L1 and the L2. While it stands to reason that increased L2 experience should relate to enhanced reading fluency in the L2, it is less clear whether L1 reading fluency should also be affected. Indeed, a commonly held belief within linguistics is that L1 skills of any kind, once acquired, are immune to the impact of L2 experience, particularly in adulthood. However, to the extent that life-long experience can adaptively update the representation and access of complex linguistic knowledge, we would expect L1 and L2 skills to trade-off to some degree as a function of increasing L2 experience. To this end, the present thesis uses eye movement recordings to investigate whether such a trade-off in L1/L2 reading occurs for French-English bilingual younger and older adults, who vary continuously in current L2 experience. The studies presented in this thesis suggest that greater current L2 experience among bilingual younger adults strengthens L2 reading, and more interestingly, weakens L1 readingâcontradicting the commonly held belief that L1 skills are immune to experience-dependent change in adulthood. Of note, experience-dependent changes in reading are attenuated for bilingual older adultsâsuggesting that accumulated life-long L1/L2 experience might counter the influence of current language experience, particularly when processing the more frequently used L1. Accordingly, the impact of current L2 experience on L1/L2 reading varies according to which end of the adult life-span bilinguals are situated. Future research should more closely examine whether the findings observed here occur for other bilingual populations (e.g., children) and other language domains (e.g., production).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it