Eye movements in German‐speaking children with and without dyslexia when reading aloud

Abstract

ABSTRACT.Purpose: The phonological difficulty and orthographic regularity of a language influence reading strategies. Only a few studies have been conducted in readers of German, which has a high grapheme-phoneme correspondence. The aim of this study was to investigate, firstly, the influence of different levels of phonological difficulty of reading material in German on reading in children and, secondly, to compare the reading strategies of German children with findings in English-speaking readers. Methods: Eye movements in 16 German children with dyslexia and 16 agematched control children (mean age 9.5 ± 0.35 years) in the third and fourth grades of school were recorded by scanning laser ophthalmoscope while they read aloud two texts of differing levels of difficulty. Results: In the dyslexia group, reading speed was slowed, and the number of saccades and regressions was raised markedly, although the percentage of regressions only slightly. The number of eye movements increased in both groups with increasing text difficulty, although much more in the dyslexia group than in the control group, whereas fixation duration was not influenced. Conclusions: Phonological difficulty influences reading speed and eye movement pattern: children with dyslexia markedly increase their number of eye movements and analyse the text in smaller units per fixation, but keep fixation duration constant. This strategy reflects their favouring of the indirect, sublexical route of grapheme-phoneme conversion, whereas readers of Englishlanguage texts are more likely to prefer the whole-word approach, i.e. the direct, lexical route that is associated with orthographic memory.

Immaturity of the Oculomotor Saccade and Vergence Interaction in Dyslexic Children: Evidence from a Reading and Visual Search Study

“…Furthermore, in Chinese dyslexic children, Li et al [7] reported abnormal eye movements in picture searching, slow and more fixations and frequent saccades of small amplitude. Recently, Trauzettel-Klosinski et al [8] reported in German dyslexic children slower reading speed and high number of saccades and regressions; similar findings have been also reported in Greek dyslexic children by Hatzidaki et al [9].…”

Effects of orthographic consistency on eye movement behavior: German and English children and adults process the same words differently

“…The chief advantage of eye movement recording was that it allowed for a detailed investigation of the time course of possible crossorthographic differences in word processing. The current findings, hence, are more informative than earlier studies in single orthographies that have already suggested that there may be fine-grained differences in eye movement patterns depending on orthographic depth (e.g., Hutzler & Wimmer, 2004;Trauzettel-Klosinski et al, 2010).…”

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

“…We examined single-word list reading as opposed to continuous texts (cf. Trauzettel-Klosinski et al, 2009), because (1) single words represent fundamental language units, (2) they allow to precisely control their length and frequency, and (3) unlike with texts, potential eye-movement effects are caused by the words' properties rather than by context, grammar, or syntax. In addition, we compare our results with evidence obtained for other regular languages and for English-speaking children.…”