Our visual world is organized based on rules that help us locate and recognize objects (e.g., knowing that a spatula goes neither in a toaster nor a bathroom), known as scene grammar. Violations to these rules may impair processing as viewers need to resolve ambiguity resulting from the unexpected element of the scene. Grammatical mismatches between objects and scene context have been shown to modulate ongoing eye-movements, even when they are irrelevant to the task at hand. Here, we investigated how sensitivity to scene grammar violations is modulated by individual differences in language experience. Psycholinguistic studies have suggested that bilinguals' constant juggling of multiple languages may help them disengage attention from task-irrelevant, distracting information more effectively.
Twenty-one young adults performed a visual search task on scenes containing scene grammar violations while their eye movements were recorded. Targets were either present or absent from the scene, but never part of the violation. Additionally, participants responded to a language background questionnaire.
Our preliminary analysis revealed significant interactions between whether the target was present or absent from the scene and second language proficiency on dwell time and number of fixations, with higher L2 proficiency being associated with shorter dwell times and fewer fixations to the scene grammar violation when the target was absent from the scene. These results suggest that knowledge of a second language may be associated with reduced sensitivity to scene grammar violations and a more effective disengagement of attention when the distracting violations are irrelevant to the search task.