Eye Movement Dynamics of Good and Poor Readers: Then and Now

Lefton, Lester A.; Nagle, Richard J.; Johnson, G; Fisher, Dennis F.

doi:10.1080/10862967909547338

Cited by 47 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…These facts have been known for some time and have been reinforced by many recent studies (Adler-Grinberg & Stark, 1978;Eden, Stein, Wood, & Wood, 1994;Elterman, Abel, Daroff, Dell'Osso, & Bornstein, 1980;Lefton, Nagle, Johnson, & Fisher, 1979: Martos & Vila, 1990. Lefton et al (1979) found that normal developmental gains made by children (wherein fixation duration decreases, saccade length increases, and the frequency of regressions decreases) are not shown by dyslexic readers.…”

Section: Eye Movements Poor Readers and Dyslexiamentioning

confidence: 83%

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Rayner

1998

Psychological Bulletin

6,150

231

5,590

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Recent studies of eye movements in reading and other information processing tasks, such as music reading, typing, visual search, and scene perception, are reviewed. The major emphasis of the review is on reading as a specific example of cognitive processing. Basic topics discussed with respect to reading are (a) the characteristics of eye movements, (b) the perceptual span, (c) integration of information across saccades, (d) eye movement control, and (e) individual differences (including dyslexia). Similar topics are discussed with respect to the other tasks examined. The basic theme of the review is that eye movement data reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes in the various tasks examined. Theoretical and practical considerations concerning the use of eye movement data are also discussed.Many studies using eye movements to investigate cognitive processes have appeared over the past 20 years. In an earlier review, I (Rayner, 1978b) argued that since the mid-1970s we have been in a third era of eye movement research and that the success of research in the current era would depend on the ingenuity of researchers in designing interesting and informative studies. It would appear from the vast number of studies using eye movement data over the past 20 years that research in this third era is fulfilling the promise inherent in using eye movement behavior to infer cognitive processes. The first era of eye movement research extended from Javal's initial observations concerning the role of eye movements in reading in 1879 (see Huey, 1908) up until about 1920. During this era, many basic facts about eye movements were discovered. Issues such as saccadic suppression (the fact that we do not perceive information during an eye movement), saccade latency (the time that it takes to initiate an eye movement), and the size of the perceptual span (the region of effective vision) were of concern in this era. The second era, which coincided with the behaviorist movement in experimental psychology, tended to have a more applied focus, and little research was undertaken with eye movements to infer cognitive processes. Although classic work by Tinker (1946) on reading and by Buswell (1935) on scene perception was carried out during this era, in retrospect, most of the work seems to have focused on the eye movements per se (or on surface aspects of the task being investigated). Tinker's (1958) final review ended on the rather pessimistic note that almost every-

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Section: Eye Movements Poor Readers and Dyslexiamentioning

confidence: 83%

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Rayner

1998

Psychological Bulletin

6,150

231

5,590

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The same holds true for fourth graders, whereas the word length span of sixth graders is as wide as that of the adults, that is, approximately 14 characters to the right of fixation. Even though the word length span does not develop after the sixth grade, readers still become more fluent in reading at a later stage, as witnessed by fewer forward fixations, fewer regressions, and longer and fewer saccades (Lefton, Nagle, Johnson, & Fisher, 1979;Rayner, 1998). Although the word length span of beginning readers is relatively large, it is evident that beginning readers devote most of their processing capacity to the currently fixated word; Rayner (1986) found that the smallest window size was least disrupting for the youngest readers.…”

Section: Development Of Components Of Global Perceptual Spanmentioning

confidence: 95%

Development of the letter identity span in reading: Evidence from the eye movement moving window paradigm

Häikiö

Bertram

Hyönä

et al. 2009

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

188

186

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“…As a child makes age-appropriate progress in reading, fixation durations and the number of regressions decrease while saccade amplitudes increase (Lefton, Nagle, Johnson, & Fisher 1979). Dyslexic children exhibit more saccades, longer fixations, shorter saccade amplitudes, and a higher percentage of regressions than normal readers (Eden, Stein, Wood, & Wood 1994;Elterman, Abel, Daroff, Dell'Osso, & Bornstein 1980;Olson, Conners, & Rack 1991).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Word length and word frequency affect eye movements in dyslexic children reading in a regular (German) orthography

et al. 2010

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We combined independently the word length and word frequency to examine if the difficulty of reading material affects eye movements in readers of German, which has high orthographic regularity, comparing the outcome with previous findings available in other languages. Sixteen carefully selected German-speaking dyslexic children (mean age, 9.5 years) and 16 age-matched controls read aloud four lists, each comprising ten unrelated words. The lists varied orthogonally in word length and word frequency: high-frequency, short; high-frequency, long; low-frequency, short; low-frequency, long. Eye movements were measured using a scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO). In dyslexic children, fixation durations and the number of saccades increased both with word length and word frequency. The percentage of regressions was only increased for low-frequency words. Most of these effects were qualitatively similar in the two groups, but stronger in dyslexic children, pointing to a deficient higher-level word processing, especially phonological deficit. The results indicate that reading eye movements in German children are modulated by the degree of difficulty, and orthographic regularity of the language can determine the nature of modulation. The findings suggest that, similar to Italian but unlike English readers, German children prefer indirect sub-lexical strategy of grapheme-phoneme conversion.

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Eye Movement Dynamics of Good and Poor Readers: Then and Now

Cited by 47 publications

References 9 publications

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.

Development of the letter identity span in reading: Evidence from the eye movement moving window paradigm

Word length and word frequency affect eye movements in dyslexic children reading in a regular (German) orthography

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