Effects of individual differences in verbal skills on eye-movement patterns during sentence reading

Abstract

This study is a large-scale exploration of the influence that individual reading skills exert on eye-movement behavior in sentence reading. Seventy one non-college-bound 16–24 year-old speakers of English completed a battery of 18 verbal and cognitive skill assessments, and read a series of sentences as their eye movements were monitored. Statistical analyses were performed to establish what tests of reading abilities were predictive of eye-movement patterns across this population and how strong the effects were. We found that individual scores in rapid automatized naming and word identification tests (i) were the only participant variables with reliable predictivity throughout the time-course of reading; (ii) elicited effects that superceded in magnitude the effects of established predictors like word length or frequency; and (iii) strongly modulated the influence of word length and frequency on fixation times. We discuss implications of our findings for testing reading ability, as well as for research of eye-movements in reading.

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

“…In adults, there are clear IDs in both online language processing and ultimate attainment. The quality of lexical representations predicts individual differences in several aspects of reading [40,41], and may lead to the development of qualitatively different reading strategies over an individual's development [42]. There are also significant individual differences in syntactic processing, including in the processing of relative several structures are still not fully mastered at the group level even in adolescence.…”

Linking memory and language: Evidence for a serial-order learning impairment in dyslexia

“…In line with the lexical-quality hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007), Szmalec et al (2011) argued that if the order of the sublexical constituents of a newly learned word is not optimally consolidated as a single lexical entry in long-term memory, its lexical representation will be impoverished. 2 This, in turn, could impair lexical access for that entry, disrupt normal procedures for mapping grapheme sequences to phoneme sequences Serial-order learning in dyslexia (Whitney & Cornelissen, 2005), and hence affect reading accuracy and fluency (Kuperman & Van Dyke, 2011;Perfetti, 2007). However, to our knowledge, no published research has tested whether the impaired long-term learning of verbal serial information for people with dyslexia is indeed associated with difficulties in acquiring novel lexical representations.…”

Individual differences in the perceptual span during reading: Evidence from the moving window technique

“…Individual differences on a variety of cognitive tasks have been shown to relate to variability in eye movements during reading (e.g., Ashby, Rayner, & Clifton, 2005;Jared, Levy, & Rayner, 1999;Kuperman & Van Dyke, 2011). A key requirement for explaining the nature of individual differences during reading is to better understand how and why readers differ in their ability to extract visual information from the parafovea and to use this information to make processing more efficient.…”