It’s not what you see: it’s the language you say it in

In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the interplay between visual and linguistic information processing during time-telling, and how this is affected by speaking in a non-native language. We compared time-telling in Greek and English, which differ in time-telling word order (hour vs. minute mentioned first), by contrasting Greek-English bilinguals speaking in their L1-Greek or their L2-English, and English monolingual speakers. All three groups were faster when telling the time for digital than for analogue clocks, and when telling the time for the first half-hour than the second half-hour. Critically, first fixation and gaze duration analyses for the hour and minute regions showed a different pattern for Greek-English bilinguals when speaking in their L1 versus L2, with the latter resembling that of English monolinguals. Our results suggest that bilingual speakers’ eye-movement programming was influenced by the type of time-telling utterance specific to the language of production currently in use.