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Ignorance of a foreign language can be "read" by the look in your eyes
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
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When a person's gaze lingers on unfamiliar words while reading, one can judge their insufficient knowledge of a foreign language.
When reading, a person's gaze moves unevenly along the lines of a written text: some words are read quickly, while on others the eyes "pause" (this "pause" lasts approximately 200-250 ms, while the movement from word to word lasts 1/20 of a second).
In addition, while reading, a person periodically returns to some passages that have just been read. However, during cursory reading (for example, when the text is perceived without problems), such “stops” are extremely insignificant and practically unnoticeable: a person seems to slide his gaze along the lines.
When reading a foreign text with poor knowledge of the language, the gaze stops on unfamiliar words for quite a long time. Experts representing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found out that by eye movement it is possible to determine whether a person knows the language well.
Almost 150 students from different parts of the world were involved in the experiment: English was not their native language. The students were asked to read a text in English (in some cases the text was the same, and in others it was different). The movement of the eyes was monitored by special equipment, which simultaneously recorded which words caused the greatest "inhibition" in the participant.
As the researchers assumed, this simple method really did indicate the quality of knowledge of a foreign language.
Most likely, the described method can become universal: it will help determine the quality of knowledge of a foreign language regardless of what language was the subject’s native language (the experiment involved volunteers who considered Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. their native language).
Experts believe that the study should involve a larger number of participants representing radically different language groups. Perhaps, determining knowledge by gaze will become one of the ways to test students.
But, as the researchers claim, the information obtained during the experiment has not only practical meaning. The results make it possible to understand how language learning occurs in general: how the brain perceives a new task, how the assimilation of new linguistic data proceeds.
Let us recall that today in many countries – including the United States – the widely used TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) test is used to assess language skills. This test contains a number of levels and is distinguished by a high degree of difficulty.
A detailed description of the experiment is presented in the Proceedings of the Sixteenth Regular Conference of the North American Section of the Association for Computational Linguistics (https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07329).