Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Eye movement research reveals how people allocate visual attention when reading, scanning the environment around them(Rayner, 2012). These cognitive processes come together when people view what sociolinguists refer to as, the linguisticlandscape, consisting of signage in the public space. Linguistic landscapes around the world are jointly determined by top-down socio-legal provisions, and bottom-up capacities and attitudes of individual people (Leimgruber, Vingron, & Titone,2019). In a preliminary study, we found that bilinguals differed in how they viewed naturally occurring linguistic landscapeimages (Vingron et al., 2018). We are currently analyzing data from a follow-up study that investigated whether individualdifferences in language experience among bilinguals modulate their eye movements to artificial linguistic landscape imagesthat systematically manipulate text language, position, and size, while controlling for linguistic content.