Eye movements in reading offer a rich, detailed picture of how language understanding unfolds in real time. Decades of research have demonstrated the sensitivity and quantitative functional form of how readers' eye movements are influenced by the linguistic characteristics of the words being read and their relationship with context. However, most of this work has examined only reading by native (L1) speakers, even though much of the world's population is multilingual, and non-native (L2)

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... is a ubiquitous everyday activity. Here we present an analysis of eye movements in reading in a dataset containing a large and linguistically diverse sample of English L2 readers, including a quantitative characterization of the shape of the relationship between linguistic word properties and eye movements, and how this relationship relates to the reader's independently measured L2 proficiency. Our key result is that while many of the same qualitative effects are found in L2 readers as in L1 readers, we also find a "lexicon-context tradeoff" that is sensitive to a reader's L2 proficiency. L2 readers' eye movements are generally less sensitive to a word's relationship with its context and more sensitive to the word's intrinsic properties. However, the most proficient L2 readers' eye movements approach an L1 pattern. This tradeoff supports an experience-dependent account of the speed and efficiency with which context-driven expectations can be deployed in L2 language processing, with a proficiency driven gradual shift away from lexicon-dependent processing and towards contextual processing.