Clarity and understandability are central goals in academic writing. To this end, manuals and courses on academic writing highlight multiple ways in which writers can make their message as clear as possible. However, scientific studies on academic writing have to date paid little if any attention to the extensive psycholinguistic literature on ambiguity resolution, discourse expectation, syntactic reanalysis in structures like garden path sentences, and other phenomena related to processing facilitation and disruption. This literature is highly relevant to academic writing in that it focuses in a detailed way on what makes a text maximally readable and clear.

In the present project, we have two main goals. The first is to make the case for the relevance of psycholinguistic studies to academic writing. The second is to conduct a series of studies using psycholinguistic methods (primarily eye tracking) to investigate the processing of syntactic phenomena relevant to academic writing in English. We also compare the processing of L1 readers to L2 readers, given the reality that an increasing number of both writers and readers of English scientific literature are not native speakers of English.

In our first study, we focus on complex noun phrases which are a hallmark of academic writing (Biber & Gray 2010). We compare complex noun phrases (e.g. total weekly worker sick payment cost) with their simpler counterparts (e.g. total cost of weekly payment to sick workers) in terms of their effect on reading times and number of regressions. Our hypothesis is that, in the absence of preceding context, complex noun phrases take longer to read and cause the reader to look back more often in the text for clarification, and thus hinder the processing of scientific texts.