The Effects Of Relevance And Tolerance For Ambiguity On Understanding Conflicting Information In L2 ——An Eye-Tracking Study

Personal traits and information integration across texts have been major concerns in the fields of psycholinguistics,psychology,and cognitive neuroscience.Past studies have explored information integration across texts in different relevant states,and found that relevant information was integrated better.Tolerance for ambiguity（TA）has been proved to have effects on reading comprehension.However,the effect of TA on information integration has seldom been investigated.Besides,effects of relevance on cross-texts conflict integration in L2 have not been investigated yet.Given these considerations,this study aims to investigate the effects of TA and relevance on cross-texts conflict integration during L2 reading across texts,with eye-tracking technology.A total of 62 Chinese-native university students participated in this study,with a 2（TA levels:high/low）× 2（relevance states:relevant/irrelevant）× 2（argument types:conflicting/nonconflicting）mixed factorial design.Participants with different TA levels encountered four types of information,conflicting and relevant,conflicting but irrelevant,nonconflicting but relevant,and nonconflicting and irrelevant.Then,participants responded to two tasks concerning conflict integration.The early conflict processing measures,first-pass fixations and first-pass re-inspections indicated that participants invested more in relevant information,and that high TA readers spent more in conflicting argument pairs while low TA readers spent more in the nonconflicting ones.The late integration measure,look-backs,indicated that all of the three factors,low TA levels,conflicting information,and relevant state led to more time spent in information integration.Results suggested that there was no significant difference between different TA levels in information integration,but low TA readers invested more in the stage of conflict regulation.Besides,relevant information was integrated more than the irrelevant one,because readers invested more in conflict detection and regulation.This study contributes to the understandings of theories cross-texts information integration and information integration in L2.It provides supports for content—source integration（CSI）model with empirical data.Pedagogically,it reveals the importance of teachers’ instructions and TA levels in reading teaching.In future,studies can be extended with more neuroscience techniques.