Using eye tracking to investigate what bilinguals notice about linguistic landscape images: A preliminary study

In daily life, we experience dynamic visual input referred to as the “linguistic landscape” (LL), comprised of images and text, for example, signs, and billboards ( Gorter, 2013 ; Landry & Bourhis, 1997 ; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni 2010). While much is known about LLs descriptively, less is known about what people notice when viewing LLs. Building upon the bilingual eye movement reading literature (e.g., Whitford, Pivneva, & Titone, 2016 ) and the scene viewing literature (e.g., Henderson & Ferreira, 2004 ), we report a preliminary study of French-English bilinguals’ eye movements as they viewed LL images from Montréal. These preliminary data suggest that eye tracking is a promising new method for investigating how people with different language backgrounds process real-world LL images. In daily life, we experience dynamic visual input referred to as the “linguistic landscape” (LL), comprised of images and text, for example, signs, and billboards ( Gorter, 2013 ; Landry & Bourhis, 1997 ; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni 2010). While much is known about LLs descriptively, less is known about what people notice when viewing LLs. Building upon the bilingual eye movement reading literature (e.g., Whitford, Pivneva, & Titone, 2016 ) and the scene viewing literature (e.g., Henderson & Ferreira, 2004 ), we report a preliminary study of French-English bilinguals’ eye movements as they viewed LL images from Montréal. These preliminary data suggest that eye tracking is a promising new method for investigating how people with different language backgrounds process real-world LL images.