Reading disappearing text: why do children refixate words?

Visuospatial, oculomotor, and executive reading skills evolve in elementary school, and errors are significant: a topological RAN study

We investigate the development of visuospatial and oculomotor reading skills in a cohort of elementary school children. Employing a longitudinal methodology, the study applies the Topological serial digit Rapid Automated Naming (Top-RAN) battery, which evaluates visuospatial reading skills leveraging metrics addressing crowding, distractors, and voluntary attention orientation. The participant pool comprises 142 students (66 males, 76 females), including 46 non-native speakers (21 males, 25 females), representing a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds. The Top-RAN dataset encompasses performance, error, and self-correction metrics for each subtest and student, underscoring the significance of these factors in the process of reading acquisition. Analytical methods include dimensionality reduction, clustering, and classification algorithms, consolidated into a Python package to facilitate reproducible results. Our results indicate that visuospatial reading abilities vary according to the task and demonstrate a marked evolution over time, as seen in the progressive decrease in execution times, errors, and self-corrections. This pattern supports the hypothesis that the growth of oculomotor, attentional, and executive skills is primarily fostered by educational experiences and maturation. This investigation provides valuable insights into the dynamic nature of these skills during pivotal educational stages.

Eye movements during reading in beginning and skilled readers: Impact of reading level or physiological maturation?

We begin by presenting and examining relevant data in the literature on eye movements in reading, from childhood to adulthood. In particular, we discuss the differences found in eye movements during reading between children in different age groups and with different reading levels and skilled adult readers in terms of word recognition and sentence processing. We then critically discuss two hypotheses that account for the differences between children and adults' eye movement during reading: one being reading age itself - the changes in eye movement patterns in reading are regulated by the level of reading proficiency and its automatization - and the other being the role of maturation of oculomotor control and, consequently, its possible changes in eye movement patterns during reading. Finally, we list gaps in the research field and suggest that future research will benefit from investigating eye movements during reading in ex-illiterate adults who are in the process of learning to read in order to isolate both reading and maturational factors.

Developmental trajectories of eye movements in oral and silent reading for beginning readers: a longitudinal investigation

Eye movements provide a sensitive window into cognitive processing during reading. In the present study, we investigated beginning readers' longitudinal changes in temporal and spatial measures of eye movements during oral versus silent reading, the extent to which variation in eye movements is attributable to individual differences and text differences, and the functional form of growth trajectories of eye-movement variables. Data were from 363 English-speaking children (52% male; 59.8% White) in the US who were followed longitudinally from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Results showed a rapid decrease in temporal eye-movement measures (e.g., first fixation) and an increase in spatial eye-movement measures (initial landing position) in both oral and silent reading. The majority of variance in eye movements was attributable to individual differences whereas some variance in initial landing position was due to text differences. Most eye-movement measures had nonlinear growth trajectories where fast development tapered off near the end of Grade 3 while initial fixation count and total gaze count in silent reading had a linear growth trajectory. The findings provide a first large-scale look into the developmental progression of eye movements during oral and silent reading during a critical period when reading skills rapidly develop.

Reading development at the text level: an investigation of surprisal and embeddingbased text similarity effects on eyemovements in Chinese early readers

This paper describes the use of semantic similarity measures based on distributed representations of words, sentences, and paragraphs (so-called “embeddings”) to assess the impact of supra-lexical factors on eye-movement data from early readers of Chinese. In addition, we used a corpus-based measure of surprisal to assess the impact of local word predictability. Eye movement data from 56 Chinese students were collected (a) in the students’ 4th grade and (b) one year later while they were in 5th grade. Results indicated that surprisal and some text similarity measures have a significant impact on the momentto- moment processing of words in reading. The paper presents an easy-to-use set of tools for linking the low-level aspects of fixation durations to a hierarchy of sentence-level and paragraph-level features that can be computed automatically. The study is the first attempt, as far as we are aware, to track the developmental trajectory of these influences in developing readers across a range of reading abilities. The similarity-based measures described here can be used (a) to provide a measure of reader sensitivity to sentence and paragraph cohesion and (b) to assess specific texts for their suitability for readers of different reading ability levels.

Undersweep fixations during reading in adults and children

Return sweeps take a reader's fixation from the end of one line to the start of the next. Return sweeps frequently undershoot their target and are followed by a corrective saccade toward the left margin. The pauses prior to corrective saccades are typically considered to be uninvolved in linguistic processing. However, recent findings indicate that these undersweep fixations influence skilled adult readers' subsequent reading pass across the line and provide preview of line-initial words. The current research examined these effects in children. First, a children's reading corpus analysis revealed that words receiving an undersweep fixation were more likely skipped and received shorter gaze durations during a subsequent pass. Second, a novel eye movement experiment that directly compared adults' and children's eye movements indicated that, during an undersweep fixation, readers very briefly allocate their attention to the fixated word-as indicated by inhibition of return effects during a subsequent pass-prior to deploying attention toward the line-initial word. We argue that prior to the redeployment of attention, readers extract information at the point of fixation that facilitates later encoding and saccade targeting. Given similar patterns of results for adults and children, we conclude that the mechanisms controlling for oculomotor coordination and attention necessary for reading across line boundaries are established from a very early point in reading development.

Influence of reading skill and word length on fixation-related brain activity in school-aged children during natural reading

Word length is one of the main determinants of eye movements during reading and has been shown to influence slow readers more strongly than typical readers. The influence of word length on reading in individuals with different reading skill levels has been shown in separate eye-tracking and electroencephalography studies. However, the influence of reading difficulty on cortical correlates of word length effect during natural reading is unknown. To investigate how reading skill is related to brain activity during natural reading, we performed an exploratory analysis on our data set from a previous study, where slow reading (N = 27) and typically reading (N = 65) 12-to-13.5-year-old children read sentences while co-registered ET-EEG was recorded. We extracted fixation-related potentials (FRPs) from the sentences using the linear deconvolution approach. We examined standard eye-movement variables and deconvoluted FRP estimates: intercept of the response, categorical effect of first fixation versus additional fixation and continuous effect of word length. We replicated the pattern of stronger word length effect in eye movements for slow readers. We found a difference between typical readers and slow readers in the FRP intercept, which contains activity that is common to all fixations, within a fixation time-window of 50-300 ms. For both groups, the word length effect was present in brain activity during additional fixations; however, this effect was not different between groups. This suggests that stronger word length effect in the eye movements of slow readers might be mainly due re-fixations, which are more probable due to the lower efficiency of visual processing.

Do eye movements reveal differences between monolingual and bilingual children's first-language and second-language reading? A focus on word frequency effects

An extensive body of research has examined reading acquisition and performance in monolingual children. Surprisingly, however, much less is known about reading in bilingual children, who outnumber monolingual children globally. Here, we address this important imbalance in the literature by employing eye movement recordings to examine both global (i.e., text-level) and local (i.e., word-level) aspects of monolingual and bilingual children's reading performance across their first-language (L1) and second-language (L2). We also had a specific focus on lexical accessibility, indexed by word frequency effects. We had three main findings. First, bilingual children displayed reduced global and local L1 reading performance relative to monolingual children, including larger L1 word frequency effects. Second, bilingual children displayed reduced global and local L2 versus L1 reading performance, including larger L2 word frequency effects. Third, both groups of children displayed reduced global and local reading performance relative to adult comparison groups (across their known languages), including larger word frequency effects. Notably, our first finding was not captured by traditional offline measures of reading, such as standardized tests, suggesting that these measures may lack the sensitivity to detect such nuanced between-group differences in reading performance. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that bilingual children's simultaneous exposure to two reading systems leads to eye movement reading behavior that differs from that of monolingual children and has important consequences for how lexical information is accessed and integrated in both languages.

Effects of adults aging on word encoding in reading Chinese: evidence from disappearing text

The effect of aging on the process of word encoding for fixated words and words presented to the right of the fixation point during the reading of sentences in Chinese was investigated with two disappearing text experiments. The results of Experiment 1 showed that only the 40-ms onset disappearance of word n disrupted young adults' reading performance. However, for old readers, the disappearance of word n caused disruptions until the onset time was 120 ms. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the disappearance of word n + 1 did not cause disruptions to young adults, but these conditions made old readers spend more time reading a sentence compared to the normal display condition. These results indicated a reliable aging effect on the process of word encoding when reading Chinese, and that the encoding process in the preview frame was more susceptible to normal aging compared to that in the fixation frame. We propose that sensory, cognitive, and specific factors related to the Chinese language are important contributors to these age-related differences.

Eye Movement Patterns in Natural Reading: A Comparison of Monolingual and Bilingual Reading of a Novel

INTRODUCTION AND METHOD

This paper presents a corpus of sentence level eye movement parameters for unbalanced bilingual first language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading and monolingual reading of a complete novel (56 000 words). We present important sentence-level basic eye movement parameters of both bilingual and monolingual natural reading extracted from this large data corpus.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

Bilingual L2 reading patterns show longer sentence reading times (20%), more fixations (21%), shorter saccades (12%) and less word skipping (4.6%), than L1 reading patterns. Regression rates are the same for L1 and L2 reading. These results could indicate, analogous to a previous simulation with the E-Z reader model in the literature, that it is primarily the speeding up of lexical access that drives both L1 and L2 reading development. Bilingual L1 reading does not differ in any major way from monolingual reading. This contrasts with predictions made by the weaker links account, which predicts a bilingual disadvantage in language processing caused by divided exposure between languages.

Third and fifth graders' processing of parafoveal information in reading: A study in single-word recognition

We assessed third and fifth graders' processing of parafoveal word information using a lexical decision task. On each trial, a preview word was first briefly presented parafoveally in the left or right visual field before a target word was displayed. Preview and target words could be identical, share the first three letters, or have no letters in common. Experiment 1 showed that developing readers receive the same word recognition benefit from parafoveal previews as expert readers. The impact of a change of case between preview and target in Experiment 2 showed that in all groups of readers, the preview benefit resulted from the identification of letters at an abstract level rather than from facilitation at a purely visual level. Fifth graders identified more letters from the preview than third graders. The results are interpreted within the framework of the interactive activation model. In particular, we suggest that although the processing of parafoveal information led to letter identification in developing readers, the processes involved may differ from those in expert readers. Although expert readers' processing of parafoveal information led to activation at the level of lexical representations, no such activation was observed in developing readers.

Word length and frequency effects on children's eye movements during silent reading

In the present study we measured the eye movements of a large sample of 2nd grade German speaking children and a control group of adults during a silent reading task. To be able to directly investigate the interaction of word length and frequency effects we employed controlled sentence frames with embedded target words in an experimental design in which length and frequency were manipulated independently of one another. Unlike previous studies which have investigated the interaction of word length and frequency effects in children, we used age-appropriate word frequencies for children. We found significant effects of word length and frequency for both children and adults while effects were generally greater for children. The interaction of word length and frequency was significant for children in gaze duration and total viewing time eye movement measures but not for adults. Our results suggest that children rely on sublexical decoding of infrequent words, leading to greater length effects for infrequent than frequent words while adults do not show this effect when reading children's reading materials.

An incremental boundary study on parafoveal preprocessing in children reading aloud: Parafoveal masks overestimate the preview benefit

Parafoveal preprocessing is an important factor for efficient reading and, in eye-movement studies, is typically investigated by means of parafoveal masking: Valid previews are compared to instances in which masks prevent preprocessing. A long-held assumption was that parafoveal preprocessing, as assessed by this technique, only reflects facilitation (i.e., a preview benefit). Recent studies, however, suggested that the benefit estimate is inflated due to interference of the parafoveal masks, i.e., the masks inflict processing costs. With children from Grades 4 and 6, we administered the novel incremental priming technique. The technique manipulates the salience of the previews by systematically varying its perceptibility (i.e., by visually degrading the previews). This technique does not require a baseline condition, but makes it possible to determine whether a preview induces facilitation or interference. Our salience manipulation of valid previews revealed a preview benefit in the children of both Grades. For two commonly used parafoveal masks, we observed interference corroborating the notion that masks are not a proper baseline. With the novel incremental boundary technique, in contrast, one can achieve an accurate estimate of the preview benefit.

Developmental Changes in Eye Movements and Visual Information Encoding Associated With Learning to Read

A great deal of eye-movement research has resulted in sophisticated computational models of skilled adult reading. As yet, insufficient eye-movement research has been conducted with children to allow a more thorough understanding of the developmental trajectory leading up to this end state. I argue that, in order to fully understand how children progress to skilled adult reading, it is necessary to consider changes in both cognitive processing and eye-movement behavior. By recording children’s eye movements during reading, researchers can document how printed text is encoded and incrementally delivered for subsequent cognitive processing, and understand how developmental changes in these two aspects of reading are interdependent.

Using E-Z Reader to examine the concurrent development of eye-movement control and reading skill

Compared to skilled adult readers, children typically make more fixations that are longer in duration, shorter saccades, and more regressions, thus reading more slowly (Blythe & Joseph, 2011). Recent attempts to understand the reasons for these differences have discovered some similarities (e.g., children and adults target their saccades similarly; Joseph, Liversedge, Blythe, White, & Rayner, 2009) and some differences (e.g., children's fixation durations are more affected by lexical variables; Blythe, Liversedge, Joseph, White, & Rayner, 2009) that have yet to be explained. In this article, the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading (Reichle, 2011; Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998) is used to simulate various eye-movement phenomena in adults vs. children in order to evaluate hypotheses about the concurrent development of reading skill and eye-movement behavior. These simulations suggest that the primary difference between children and adults is their rate of lexical processing, and that different rates of (post-lexical) language processing may also contribute to some phenomena (e.g., children's slower detection of semantic anomalies; Joseph et al., 2008). The theoretical implications of this hypothesis are discussed, including possible alternative accounts of these developmental changes, how reading skill and eye movements change across the entire lifespan (e.g., college-aged vs. older readers), and individual differences in reading ability.

Children's and adults' on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences during reading

While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children’s syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults’ syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, ‘The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage’ in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences such as, ‘I think I’ll wear the new skirt I bought tomorrow/yesterday. It’s really nice’ in which the attachment of an adverbial phrase was manipulated. Results showed that adults and children exhibited similar processing preferences, but that children were delayed relative to adults in their detection of initial syntactic misanalysis. It is concluded that children and adults have the same sentence-parsing mechanism in place, but that it operates with a slightly different time course. In addition, the data support the hypothesis that the visual processing system develops at a different rate than the linguistic processing system in children.