Tenth Heritage Language Research Institute

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Reading in a heritage language

One important difference between heritage language (HL) adults and second language learners is literacy. HL adults often cannot read in their heritage language especially if its orthography is not Roman-based (e.g., Cyrillic, Arabic, and logographic). Describing the challenges HL adults face in acquisition of literacy would lead to designing better materials to teach reading in HL and using appropriate written stimuli in experimental research. In this talk, I present the first results of an eye-tracking project with Russian HL adults. The goal is to establish the patterns of eye movements of HL speakers who at different stages of reading in Cyrillic. The project includes three reading tasks: (1) isolated words, (2) a narrative "How I Caught Crawfish" (a reading assessment for monolingual 8-year-olds), and (3) 72 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus (RSC) or 32 sentences from the Child RSC. The three types of eye-movement measures are collected: word fixations, probabilities of skipping words, and regressive saccades. Eye-movement patterns of the HL speakers in the correctly or incorrectly understood sentences (assessed by comprehension questions) will be compared with those of monolingual Russian adults and children. It will allow us to establish the linguistic features of the written materials (e.g., inflectional morphology and syntactic complexity) that impede acquisition of HL literacy.