Bilingual reading: The visual moving window

Abstract

This chapter critically reviews the self-paced visual moving window (VMW) technique and its variants as used in the bilingual reading literature. In the fi rst section, we provide a general overview of some of the variables known to compromise the validity of an experimental task, or an experiment in general. In the second section, we review bilingual reading experiments investigating the effects of code-switched or mixed- language sentences (e.g., Andrea dropped the LETTER /CARTA in the mailbox) as a function of context, word frequency, grammatical gender (masculine, feminine), and cognates (words with overlapping orthographical and meaning across languages) vs. homographs (words with overlapping orthographical representations but different meaning across languages). Finally, task strengths and weaknesses are discussed. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research and how this task can be used in conjunction with other tasks to explore bilingual sentence processing.