Linguistics Colloquium | The effect of multimodal input on L2 Spanish learners’ reading comprehension: An eye-tracking study, April 19

The Linguistics Colloquium series presents Tetiana Tytko discussing “The effect of multimodal input on L2 Spanish learners’ reading comprehension: An eye-tracking study” on April 19 from 12:55 to 1:50 p.m. in Gordy 310 and via Microsoft TEAMS.

Tytko is a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland and an alumna of the M.A. in Applied Linguistics program at Ohio University.

Abstract:  Multimodal materials (e.g., written text supplemented by images and/or audio) are reported to be beneficial for vocabulary acquisition. However, their effects on text comprehension have received less attention. Recent studies using eye tracking have yielded  conflicting results regarding images supporting comprehension. Specifically, young, beginner learners who paid more attention to the pictures tended to comprehend better, whereas the opposite was true for adult, advanced learners. In this study, I provide further empirical evidence to this research base by testing a new population, adult beginners, and by including a reading-only, no-image condition as the baseline. In a counterbalanced within-subject design, 66 learners of Spanish read different parts of a story while using an eye tracker under three experimental conditions: Read Only (RO), Read + Image (RI), and Read + Image + Audio (RIA).  Results revealed that comprehension, measured by a multiple-choice test, was higher in the RIA and RI conditions than in the RO condition. The number of looks at the images was greater in the RIA condition, suggesting that the audio allowed readers to attend to multimodal information. The analysis also discovered a significant moderating effect of condition on the relationship between average dwell time on images and comprehension outcomes. The longer the participants looked at the image in RIA, the higher their comprehension scores were, while the opposite was observed for RI. Pedagogical ramifications for utilizing multimodal second language reading materials and suggestions for further research are also discussed in the paper.