Global reading processes in children with high risk of dyslexia: a scanpath analysis (original) (raw)
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2010
Eye-Movements of Dyslexic Children Reading in Regular Orthography: Exploring Word Frequency and Length Effects Evgenia Hristova (ehristova@cogs.nbu.bg) Alexander Gerganov (agerganov@cogs.nbu.bg) Ekaterina Todorova (e.todorova@nbu.bg) Severina Georgieva (severina.georgieva@cogs.nbu.bg) Central and East European Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology New Bulgarian University 21 Montevideo St., 1618 Sofia, Bulgaria Abstract Eye-movements represent a great interest in studying the specificity of the reading difficulties that individuals with developmental dyslexia have. In the present study dyslexic children were pair-matched with control children in a sentence reading task. The children read sentences in Bulgarian – a Cyrillic alphabet language with regular orthography. Target nouns with controlled frequency and length were embedded in the sentences. Eye movements revealed highly significant group differences in the gaze time and the total fixation...
Reading Development During Elementary School Years. Evidence from Eye Movements
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The present dissertation examined reading development during elementary school years by means of eye movement tracking. Three different but related issues in this field were assessed. First of all, the development of parafoveal processing skills in reading was investigated. Second, it was assessed whether and to what extent sublexical units such as syllables and morphemes are used in processing Finnish words and whether the use of these sublexical units changes as a function of reading proficiency. Finally, the developmental trend in the speed of visual information extraction during reading was examined. With regard to parafoveal processing skills, it was shown that 2 nd graders extract letter identity information approx. 5 characters to the right of fixation, 4 th graders approx. 7 characters to the right of fixation, and 6 th graders and adults approx. 9 characters to the right of fixation. Furthermore, it was shown that all age groups extract more parafoveal information within compound words than across adjectivenoun pairs of similar length. In compounds, parafoveal word information can be extracted in parallel with foveal word information, if the compound in question is of high frequency. With regard to the use of sublexical units in Finnish word processing, it was shown that less proficient 2 nd graders use both syllables and morphemes in the course of lexical access. More proficient 2 nd graders as well as older readers seem to process words more holistically. Finally, it was shown that 60 ms is enough for 4 th graders and adults to extract visual information from both 4-letter and 8-letter words, whereas 2 nd graders clearly needed more than 60 ms to extract all information from 8letter words for processing to proceed smoothly. The present dissertation demonstrates that Finnish 2 nd graders develop their reading skills rapidly and are already at an adult level in some aspects of reading. This is not to say that there are no differences between less proficient (e.g., 2 nd graders) and more proficient readers (e.g., adults) but in some respects it seems that the visual system used in extracting information from the text is matured by the 2 nd grade. Furthermore, the present dissertation demonstrates that the allocation of attention in reading depends much on textual properties such as word frequency and whether words are spatially unified (as in compounds) or not. This flexibility of the attentional system naturally needs to be captured in word processing models. Finally, individual differences within age groups are quite substantial but it seems that by the end of the 2 nd grade practically all Finnish children have reached a reasonable level of reading proficiency.
Spatial and temporal measurements of eye movement in children with dyslexia
Collegium antropologicum
This paper presents the first reading data in Croatian collected with an eye-tracking device. The eye-tracking method allows for research into two crucial levels underlying reading: the visual and the cognitive. The aim of this paper is to show the differences in eye movements in children with dyslexia using the principles of cognitive-control view. Despite the well-known definitions and vast literature on dyslexia, the neural basis of dyslexia varies greatly on the individual level. The three children studied in this paper were tested behaviorally using set of language tests for language behavior assessment on all language levels: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon and pragmatics. Two children had low scores on most language tests, and all three children had poor reading and writing level. Each of the children had to read two texts silently while their eye movements were recorded by means of an infrared eye-tracking system. We analyzed the number, position, and duration of fixa...
Eye movement recordings during reading tasks in children with mixed dyslexia
Introduction and Methodology: In order to better understand how mixed dyslexia (MD) manifests in the Spanish language, we studied the patterns in eye movements (EM) and errors of omission, inversion, transposition, substitution, addition, semantic change and lexicalization, committed during reading tasks for words, pseudowords and paragraphs, in 30 fourth grade children (15 MD and 15 controls). Results and Conclusion: We found statistically significant differences between cases and controls, where children with MD showed more substitution, omission and repetition errors, together with more fixations and single saccades. These differences result in decreased reading speed and comprehension level of textbooks.
Eye movements of children and adults reading in three different orthographies
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2021
In this study, we investigated developmental aspects of eye movements during reading of three languages (English, German and Finnish) that vary widely in their orthographic complexity and predictability. Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules are rather complex in English and German but relatively simple in Finnish. Despite their differences in complexity, the rules in German and Finnish are highly predictable, whereas English has many exceptions. Comparing eye movement development in these three languages, thus, allows us to investigate whether orthographic complexity and predictability have separate effects on eye movement development. Three groups of children, matched on years of reading instruction, along with a group of proficient adult readers in each language were tested. All participants read stimulus materials that were carefully translated and back-translated across all three languages. The length and frequency of 48 target words were manipulated experimentally within the stimulus set. For children, word length effects were stronger in Finnish and German than in English. In addition, in English effects of word frequency were weaker and only present for short words. Generally, English children showed a qualitatively different reading pattern, while German and Finnish children's reading behavior was rather similar. These results indicate that the predictability of an orthographic system is more important than its complexity for children's reading development. Adults' reading behavior, in contrast, was remarkably similar across languages. Our results, thus, demonstrate that eye movements are sensitive to language-specific features in children's reading, but become more homogenous as reading skill matures.
Reading and Writing, 2016
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Eye movement correlates of acquired central dyslexia
2010
Based on recent progress in theory and measurement techniques, the analysis of eye movements has become one of the major methodological tools in experimental reading research. Our work uses this approach to advance the understanding of impaired information processing in acquired central dyslexia of stroke patients with aphasia. Up to now there has been no research attempting to analyze both wordbased viewing time measures and local fixation patterns in dyslexic readers. The goal of the study was to find out whether specific eye movement parameters reflect pathologically preferred segmental reading in contrast to lexical reading.
Frontiers in Communication, 2021
Research on reading development attempts to explain differences in the reading patterns of adults and children. Previous studies, which typically analyzed word length and frequency effects in developing readers, often focused on dyslexic or dysfluent readers. Similar to previous studies, we investigated the effects of word length and word frequency on the eye movements of children and added several novel aspects: We tested 66 typically developing German-speaking children. Children’s oral reading fluency was used as measure of reading ability. Only fast readers (n = 34, mean age 10.9 ± 0.9 years) and slow readers (n = 32, 11.2 ± 0.9 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment and silently read an age-appropriate original narrative text from a children’s book. The analysis of silent reading of the entire text confirmed the earlier group classification. To analyze word length and frequency, we selected 40 nouns as target words in the text. We found significant effects of word len...
Neuropsychologia, 2009
Please cite this article in press as: Thaler, V., et al. Different behavioral and eye movement patterns of dyslexic readers with and without attentional deficits during single word reading. Neuropsychologia (2009), a b s t r a c t Comorbidity of learning disabilities is a very common phenomenon which is intensively studied in genetics, neuropsychology, prevalence studies and causal deficit research. In studies on the behavioral manifestation of learning disabilities, however, comorbidity is often neglected. In the present study, we systematically examined the reading behavior of German-speaking children with dyslexia, of children with attentional problems, of children with comorbid dyslexia and attentional problems and of normally developing children by measuring their reading accuracy, naming latencies and eye movement patterns during single word reading. We manipulated word difficulty by contrasting (1) short vs. long words with (2) either low or high sublexical complexity (indexed by consonant cluster density). Children with dyslexia only (DYS) showed the expected reading fluency impairment of poor readers in regular orthographies but no accuracy problem. In contrast, comorbid children (DYS + AD) had significantly higher error rates than all other groups, but less of a problem with reading fluency than DYS. Concurrently recorded eye movement measures revealed that DYS made the highest number of fixations, but exhibited shorter mean single fixations than DYS + AD. Word length had the strongest effect on dyslexic children, whereas consonant cluster density affected all groups equally. Theoretical implications of these behavioral and eye movement patterns are discussed and the necessity for controlling for comorbid attentional deficits in children with reading deficits is highlighted. berlin.de (V. Thaler).