Bronson Hui

Picture books, which feature the display of both text and images, have been widely used in second language (L2) learning and teaching. During picture book reading, learners need to split their attention between text and images. This behavior is believed to be crucial in cross-modal integration of information that supports comprehension. Despite its importance, integrative saccades, which refer to rapid eye movements between information presented in different modalities, have received little attention in previous L2 multimodal input research. Moreover, studies that capture attention-based learning processes often overlook the ongoing learning processes as a mediator in the treatment-outcome relationship (Jia, Ruirui, and Bronson Hui. 2025. “Modeling Relationships Between Learning Conditions, Processes, and Outcomes: An Introduction to Mediation Analysis in SLA Research.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 47 (3): 912–47). To fill these gaps, the present brief report reanalyzed the eye-tracking data from Tytko, Tetiana, Bronson Hui, and Nick Pandža (2026. “The Effect of Multimodal Input on L2 Learners’ Reading Comprehension: A Pre-registered, Eye-Tracking Study.” Modern Language Journal 110 (1): 210–39), which examined the effect of different combinations of multimodal input reading conditions: reading-only (RO) versus reading with images (RI) versus reading with images and audio (RIA) on comprehension. With their data, we aim to explore the extent to which the effect of reading conditions on reading comprehension was mediated by the number of integrative saccades. To address this intermediary relationship, we conducted multilevel mediation analysis. It was found that, through integrative saccades, the RIA condition led to better reading comprehension than the RI condition, confirming the hypothesized mechanism that the inclusion of the audio in the RIA condition allows L2 learners to go back and forth between text and images more frequently, and this increased integration of verbal and pictorial information, in turn, led to better reading comprehension.

Prior research has reported vocabulary learning benefits from reading while listening (RWL), but few testable predictions have been made regarding an underlying mechanism for benefits. In this study, reading ahead of the audio was examined as a potential source of benefits during RWL. Fifty-nine participants had their eye movements tracked during a contextualized RWL task embedded with 25 pseudowords 10 times each, followed by three learning outcome measures: form recognition, meaning recognition, and meaning recall. Results indicated that (a) reading ahead facilitated initial form decoding as indexed by gaze durations, especially during early instances; (b) it only predicted the deepest level of vocabulary knowledge tested—meaning recall. These findings indicate that reading ahead may reflect the critical alignment between auditory input, orthographic decoding, and phonological encoding processes during reading, thereby facilitating faster processing when reading ahead than not reading ahead, as well as form-meaning mapping for new words.

Online experimental methods have become increasingly prevalent in second language (L2) research. This introduction to the special issue on online experimentation in applied linguistics begins by outlining the key challenges that online data collection poses for experimental research, organized around three domains: technology, participant recruitment, and performance-related factors. The first section provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue, which include eight empirical studies, three methodological guidance papers, a conceptual article, and five responses. The second section presents a synthesis of validation reporting practices across a sample of 13 online L2 studies, coded against Rodd's (2024) framework across the three domains. This synthesis reveals that reporting is heavily skewed toward participant performance safeguards, with technology- and recruitment-related safeguards considerably underreported. A further finding is that researchers tend to rely on reactive, back-end measures to address data quality concerns rather than proactive, design-based safeguards. The third section draws on these findings to offer 10 recommendations as a principled framework to guide researchers in designing, conducting, and reporting online L2 experiments more transparently and rigorously.

Multimodal materials (e.g., written text supplemented by images and/or audio)are commonplace in language classrooms. While they have been consistentlyshown to be beneficial for vocabulary acquisition, the efficacy of multimodalinput in scaffolding text comprehension is less clear. Conflicting findings havealso been reported in terms of the relationship between comprehension andattention to pictures as measured by eye tracking. In this pre-registered study,we provide further empirical evidence to this research base by testing a newpopulation, adult beginners, and by including a reading-only, no-imagecondition as the baseline. In a counterbalanced within-subject design, 65 learnersof Spanish were exposed to different parts of a story on an eye tracker underthree experimental conditions: Reading Only (RO), Reading + Image (RI), andReading + Image + Audio (RIA). Results revealed that comprehension washigher in the RIA and RI than in the RO condition, indicative of the usefulnessof the audio and/or the image. The number of looks at the images was higher inthe RIA condition, confirming that the audio allowed readers to attend to thepictorial information provided. Attention to the image, however, positivelypredicted comprehension scores only for the RIA condition.

Multimodal materials (e.g., written text supplemented by images and/or audio) are commonplace in language classrooms. While they have been consistently shown to be beneficial for vocabulary acquisition, the efficacy of multimodal input in scaffolding text comprehension is less clear. Conflicting findings have also been reported in terms of the relationship between comprehension and attention to pictures as measured by eye tracking. In this preregistered study, we provide further empirical evidence to this research base by testing a new population, adult beginners, and by including a reading‐only, no‐image condition as the baseline. In a counterbalanced within‐subject design, 65 learners of Spanish were exposed to different parts of a story on an eye tracker under three experimental conditions: reading only (RO), reading + image (RI), and reading + image + audio (RIA). Results revealed that comprehension was higher in the RIA and RI than in the RO condition, indicative of the usefulness of the audio and/or the image. The number of looks at the images was higher in the RIA condition, confirming that the audio allowed readers to attend to the pictorial information provided. Attention to the image, however, positively predicted comprehension scores only for the RIA condition.

This study examined second language vocabulary processing and learning in reading only (RO) versus reading while listening (RWL). 119 English learners read or read‐while‐listening to a story embedded with 25 pseudowords, 10 times each, and had their eye movements tracked. Gaze duration (GD) and total reading time (TRT) measured processing of target vocabulary, and learning outcome tests included recognition and recall tests in both visual and auditory item modalities. Eye‐tracking analyses revealed (a) a significant decrease in GD and TRT for both groups, and (b) faster reading times and greater rate of decrease across instances in RO. All learning outcomes indicated superior scores from RWL in auditory items and item modality effects in RO, but not RWL, while a group‐by‐item‐modality interaction was uncovered on two of three outcomes. Results indicated a slightly slower multimodal reading process, with superior learning of phonological information from RWL, without detriment to orthographic learning.

In a close replication study of Darcy et al., (2016), Huensch (2024) reported a lack of clear relationships between inhibitory control (IC) and phonological processing, contrary to the initial findings. Given the general unreliability of response-time differences, which are often the basis of IC measures and could potentially mask small effects, we performed secondary analyses on Huensch’s (2024) open data set to investigate (a) the extent to which the reliability of IC measures could be improved using model-based approaches (Hui & Wu, 2024), (b) the correlations between the different IC tasks, and (c) their predictive power for phonological processing, based on the more reliable indices. Results showed that model-based approaches generally improved reliability, and particularly for the Stroop and Simon tasks to acceptable levels. Yet, correlations between IC tasks remained low, and partial correlation and hierarchical regression still failed to reveal significant relationships between IC and phonological processing, further confirming Huensch’s (2024) findings.