How Do Stress Situations Affect Higher-Level Text Processing in L1 and L2 Readers? An Eye-Tracking Study

Existing studies have revealed that the reading comprehension ability of readers can be adversely affected by their psychosocial stress. Yet, the detailed impact of stress on various stages of text processing is understudied. This study aims to explore how the higher-level text processing ability, including syntactic parsing, sentence integration, and global text processing, of first language (L1) and second language (L2) English readers is affected under stress situations. In addition, the roles of trait anxiety, the central executive function moderating stress effects, in text processing were also examined. Twenty-two L1 readers and twenty-one L2 readers were asked to perform reading comprehension tasks under different stress situations. Eye-tracking technology was adopted to record participants' visual behaviors while reading, and ten eye-movement measurements were computed to represent the effect of different types of text processing. The results demonstrate that the stress reduced the efficiency of syntactic parsing and sentence integration in both L1 and L2 groups, but only impaired global text processing in L2 readers. Specifically, L2 readers focused more on the topic structure of text to facilitate comprehension under stress situations. Moreover, only L1 readers' higher-level text processing was affected by trait anxiety, while L2 readers' processing was mainly related to their reading proficiency level. Future studies and applications were discussed. The findings advance our understanding of stress effects on different stages of higher-level text processing. They also have practical implications for developing interventions to help language learners suffering from stress disorders.