Adults who have completed less education live shorter and less healthy lives. All indicators are
that this disparity is growing. Educational outcomes are closely tied to literacy and reading skill.
In order to improve educational outcomes for all students we need a research base that reflects
the population. This is currently not the case. Still today most research on reading is based on
English-speaking monolinguals. Yet, we know from recent research that reading for bilinguals is
fundamentally different from monolinguals. Therefore, theories based on monolingual speakers
cannot be applied across the gamut of language experience and linguistic diversity. The long-
term objective of this line of research is to test and extend current theories of reading so that
they address the unique cognitive characteristics of bilingual readers. The short-term goal of this
proposal is to test and extend a specific, influential model of discourse comprehension, the
landscape model, to bilingual readers. According to the model readers integrate information
across text through two types of retrieval: cohort-based retrieval and coherence-based retrieval.
Cohort-based retrieval is an implicit memory process, based on an automatic spread of
activation. Depending on a reader’s goals for comprehension, they may engage in more
effortful, coherence-based retrieval. This form of retrieval is controlled, deliberate and engaged
when a discrepancy is detected. Through this form of retrieval a reader seeks to establish global
coherence, seeking a way to integrate incoming information with an on-going representation of
the text as a whole. The specific aims of this proposal are to examine how the strength of
cohort-activation (Specific Aim 1) and coherence-based retrieval (Specific Aim 2) are affected
by the (1) match in language across texts, (2) genre of text and (3) cross-language reading
experience for bilinguals. The overall approach to achieving these aims will consist of
presenting Spanish-English bilingual university students pairs of text passages to read while
their eye-movements are recorded. Half of the passages will be narratives and half will be
expository, science texts. Passages will contain some facts that are revised in the second
passage, requiring the reader to update their representation of the discourse. Second passages
will either be in the same or different language as the first passage. The impact of these
variables on reading times for critical areas of text and responses to follow-up comprehension
questions will be examined through linear mixed-effect models and ANCOVA’s. We will also
include in the analyses scores that reflect participants’ experience reading in each of their
languages.