ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1610120
Asymmetry in the Retention of Content and Surface Linguistic Information During Reading in L1 and L2
Provisionally accepted
- 1Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
- 2University of Haifa, Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This eye-tracking study investigates how native (L1) and non-native (L2) German speakers retain content and surface linguistic information during reading, drawing on the Construction-Integration Model of text comprehension. Participants read narrative texts, followed by picture and sentence reading tasks designed to assess memory for content and surface linguistic forms (e.g., grammatical voice, attribute position). Results reveal an asymmetric retention pattern: L1 readers demonstrated stronger retention of content information, indicated by longer fixation times on semantically incongruent pictures and sentences. In contrast, L2 readers showed enhanced retention of surface linguistic forms, evidenced by extended fixations on sentences with altered surface structures. These findings align with the Shallow Structure Hypothesis and the Declarative/Procedural Model, suggesting that L2 readers rely more heavily on declarative memory for surface forms due to less automatized syntactic processing. By directly comparing L1 and L2 retention patterns, this study provides novel insights into the mental representation of text in L2 readers, highlighting an increased retention of surface information that is accompanied by reduced content retention.
Keywords: Memory, reading, eye tracking, mental text model, content information, Surface linguistic information, native-non-native differences
Received: 11 Apr 2025; Accepted: 19 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bordag, Opitz and Berulava. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Andreas Opitz, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.