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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 21, No. 0, pp.617-635
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2021
Received 07 Jun 2021 Revised 10 Jul 2021 Accepted 25 Jul 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.21..202107.617

Cross-linguistic Differences of Temporal Information Processing Between L1 and L2 in Narrative Text Comprehension: An Eye-Tracking Study

JungEun Choi ; Moongee Jeon
(1st author) Lecturer, Faculty of Liberal Education, Seoul Nat’l University choi7541@snu.ac.kr
(corresponding author) Professor, Dept. of English Language & Literature, Konkuk University mjeon1@konkuk.ac.kr


© 2021 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The present study investigated cross-linguistic differences of temporal information processing between Korean as L1 and English as L2 in narratives. The study was based on the event-indexing model, which is one of the situation models in text comprehension. Recognizing that temporal information processing differs in Korean and English reading depending on the temporal shift markers such as a moment later, an hour later, and a day later, this study sought to explain the cause of the differences. An eye-tracking experimental method was employed for a closer investigation. The examination focused on the temporal shift markers and the subsequent critical event information contained in the target sentence. Measures of eye-dwell time for the respective information included the first pass gaze duration, the regressions into the information, and the second pass gaze duration. The results indicated that a significant difference between L1 and L2 occurred in the processing of the temporal shift markers. While L1 readers read the temporal information gradually slower as the distance of the temporal shift increased, L2 readers read the temporal marker of an hour later the slowest. The results supported that the processing of temporal information differs between L1 and L2, and that L2 proficiency is a crucial variable for L2 successful situation model construction.

Keywords:

situation model, temporal information, narratives, eye-tracking, Korean learners of English

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5B5A07074313).

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