Video games are prevalent and provide interactive reading platforms for learning. Despite its popularity and pedagogical potential, little is known about how players from different language backgrounds read text in video games. This exploratory study recruited 104 participants, including 56 first-language (L1) English speakers and 48 second-language (L2) English learners, who played the tutorial chapter of a commercial video game while their eye movements were recorded. The results showed that, at the subtitle level, L2 players had higher fixation counts and longer saccades than L1 players. At the word level, the word frequency effect was stronger among L2 players than L1 players in both early- and late-stage linguistic processing, as indicated by longer fixations on lower-frequency words. These eye-movement patterns suggest that L2 players adopted a more in-depth and effortful scanning strategy than L1 players when sampling textual information in gameplay. A similar lexical processing pattern was also found in an exploratory analysis of L2 players with different levels of L2 proficiency, further indicating the importance of vocabulary size for efficient lexical processing. The findings provide empirical insights into reading theories and practices related to digital reading.

High subtitle speed undoubtedly impacts the viewer experience. However, little is known about how fast subtitles might impact the reading of individual words. This article presents new findings on the effect of subtitle speed on viewers’ reading behavior using word-based eye-tracking measures with specific attention to word skipping and rereading. In multimodal reading situations such as reading subtitles in video, rereading allows people to correct for oculomotor error or comprehension failure during linguistic processing or integrate words with elements of the image to build a situation model of the video. However, the opportunity to reread words, to read the majority of the words in the subtitle and to read subtitles to completion, is likely to be compromised when subtitles are too fast. Participants watched videos with subtitles at 12, 20, and 28 characters per second (cps) while their eye movements were recorded. It was found that comprehension declined as speed increased. Eye movement records also showed that faster subtitles resulted in more incomplete reading of subtitles. Furthermore, increased speed also caused fewer words to be reread following both horizontal eye movements (likely resulting in reduced lexical processing) and vertical eye movements (which would likely reduce higher-level comprehension and integration).