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The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study

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Published/Copyright: February 25, 2025
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 11 Issue 1

Abstract

This study explores the cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language (L2) reading, aiming to investigate the potential differences and their effects on comprehension performance. Twenty-five Chinese students read an English text while their eye movements were recorded. A reading comprehension test evaluated the participants’ L2 reading comprehension performance. The results reveal a significant difference in total reading time between nouns and verbs. Additionally, total reading time, gaze duration, and the number of fixations on both nouns and verbs are negatively correlated with L2 reading comprehension performance. These findings suggest that while the initial processing mechanisms of nouns and verbs may be similar, they diverge in late stages of processing.

Keywords: noun-verb dissociation; Chinese-English bilinguals; eye-tracking; second language reading
Corresponding author: Lingshan Huang, College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Technology, No. 288 Liuhe Road, Hangzhou, CN-310058, China, E-mail:

Funding source: Research Project of Zhejiang Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences

Award Identifier / Grant number: 2025N148

Funding source: the Humanities and Social Science Foundation of Zhejiang University of Technology

Award Identifier / Grant number: SKY-ZX-20240005

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all of the participants, without whom this work would not be possible.

  1. Conflict of interest: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

  2. Research funding: This work was supported by the Research Project of Zhejiang Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences [grant number 2025N148], and the Humanities and Social Science Foundation of Zhejiang University of Technology [grant number SKY-ZX-20240005].

  3. Data availability: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Received: 2024-05-21
Accepted: 2025-01-22
Published Online: 2025-02-25

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0105
Keywords for this article
noun-verb dissociation; Chinese-English bilinguals; eye-tracking; second language reading

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2025
  4. Research Articles
  5. Vowel formant track normalization using discrete cosine transform coefficients
  6. Asymmetry in French speech-in-noise perception: the effects of native dialect and cross-dialectal exposure
  7. Direct pseudo-partitives in US English
  8. A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian
  9. Semantic granularity in derivation
  10. Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
  11. The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese
  12. A comparative study of 时 si 2 /shi 2 in Meixian Hakka and Ancient Chinese using the Minimalist Program
  13. A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
  14. Yeah, but how? Operationalizing the functions of the discourse-pragmatic marker yeah
  15. Hotspots for acoustic politeness in Korean and Japanese deferential speech
  16. How fast is fast and how slow is slow in mental simulation? Two rating studies on Estonian speed adverbs
  17. Discourse effects in processing Chinese reflexive pronouns
  18. Attitudinal negotiation: the analysis of online commentary videos about an international event on Chinese social media platform bilibili.com
  19. Crosslinguistic constructions and strategies: where do concessive conditionals fit in?
  20. Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift
  21. Null pronoun interpretation probed via thematic role ambiguity: a case in Korean
  22. Experimental investigation on quantifier scope in Chinese relative clauses
  23. Sensitivity to honorific agreement: a window into predictive processing
  24. The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
  25. Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study
  26. Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters
  27. The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study
  28. Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L3 Mandarin
  29. Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew
  30. Multimodal language processing in school-aged Mandarin-speaking children: the role of beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information
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  32. Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
  33. Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
  34. Salient Language in Context (SLIC): a web app for collecting real-time attention data in response to audio samples
  35. Children’s emerging sociolinguistic expectations around social roles: a triangulated approach
  36. Situating speakers in change: a methodology for quantifying degree and direction of change over the lifespan
  37. Testing the effect of speech separation on vowel formant estimates
  38. Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach
  39. Sociolinguistic research projects as brands
  40. Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?
  41. Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish
  42. Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation
  43. Using ATLAS.ti for constructing and analysing multimodal social media corpora
  44. Exploring the effect of semantic diversity on boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemy using deep contextualized word embedding
  45. Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation
  46. Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
  47. Encoding Chinese metaphorical motion: a typological perspective
  48. Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese
  49. Did he lead monologues or did he talk to himself? How typological distance between source and target language influences the preservation of metaphorical mappings in translation
  50. How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish
  51. Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality
  52. Corrigendum
  53. Corrigendum to: Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
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