Word familiarity effects in efl reading: an eye tracking study

Do you know what happens in mind when we encounter a novel word while reading anewspaper, a paragraph or a short story? Via eye tracking technique, this study aimed togather clues about how our mind reacts to an unknown word while we read in anotherlanguage by examining word familiarity effects on eye movements during EFL reading. Aftera vocabulary test, eye movements of 60 EFL learners at intermediate level were recordedwhile they read identical sentence pairs including words with different length and frequency.The results showed that (1) total time spent on words and reanalysis times were predicted byvocabulary knowledge, (2) initial word processing was not predicted by vocabulary size (3)unfamiliar words attended more attention and required more cognitive effort than familiarwords, (4) familiar words are processed in similar time spans for English as L1 and L2 butunfamiliar words cause more cognitive load in EFL. The results were discussed incomparison to L1 eye movement research in reading and were evaluated regarding EFLreading in terms of noticing hypothesis, incidental vocabulary acquisition and EFL readinginstruction.