Children's development of oculomotor control during reading

Abstract

Data are presented from five experiments examining the characteristics of children’s and adults’ eye movement behaviour during reading. In Experiments One and Two, participants’ eye movements were measured when reading text where every word disappeared at a certain moment after fixation onset. In Experiment One, the words disappeared 60 ms after fixation onset. For children, there were differences in their eye movement behaviour across the two conditions, while adults were able to read the disappearing text normally. In Experiment Two, the presentation duration was manipulated. The differences between adults and children across the conditions suggested that age-related changes when reading disappearing text were not a consequence of a development change in the speed of visual processing. Rather, the differences were related to the reader’s cognitive processing of the text.

In Experiment Three, children’s and adults’ eye movements were measured as they read text in which the word to the right of fixation disappeared 60 ms after onset of fixation on word N. Children’s reading was more disrupted by the manipulation than adults’, and this was attributed to a developmental change in the timing of the initiation of parafoveal pre-processing.

Experiment Four measured children’s and adults’ binocular coordination during reading. Children showed a greater magnitude of disparity between the two eyes than adults, and also made a higher proportion of crossed fixations than adults.

In Experiment Five, children’s and adults’ binocular eye movements were recorded as they read single words that did or did not contain a single-letter misspelling and made a decision as to whether they were correctly spelled. The results showed that children, as well as adults, achieved a single percept through a mechanism of fusion rather than suppression.

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