Second language learners’ reading is less efficient and more effortful than native reading. However, the source of their difficulty is unclear; L2 readers might struggle with reading in a different orthography, or they might have difficulty with later stages of linguistic interpretation of the input, or both. The present study explored the source of L2 reading difficulty by analyzing the distribution of fixation durations in reading. In three studies, we observed that L2 readers experience an increase in Mu, which we interpret as indicating early orthographic processing difficulty, when the L2 has a significantly different writing system than the L1 (e.g., Chinese and English) but not when the writing systems were similar (e.g., Portuguese and English). L2 readers also experienced an increase in Tau, indicating later-arising processing difficulty which likely reflects later-stage linguistic processes, when they read for comprehension. L2 readers of Chinese also experienced an additional increase in Tau.

中文翻译：

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二语阅读中眼球运动的前高斯分析

与母语阅读相比，第二语言学习者的阅读效率更低、更费力。然而，他们困难的根源尚不清楚；L2 读者可能难以阅读不同的正字法，或者他们可能难以接受输入的后期语言解释，或两者兼而有之。本研究通过分析阅读中注视时长的分布来探究二语阅读困难的根源。在三项研究中，我们观察到 L2 阅读者的 Mu 增加，我们将其解释为表明早期正字法处理困难，当 L2 具有与 L1 显着不同的书写系统（例如，中文和英文）时但不是当书写系统时相似（例如，葡萄牙语和英语）。L2 读者也经历了 Tau 的增加，表明后来出现的处理困难，这可能反映了他们阅读理解时的后期语言过程。汉语的 L2 读者也经历了 Tau 的额外增加。