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

Abstract

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.

Чтение Про Себя У Младших Школьников: Исследование Движений Глаз

“…There were expectedly more total fixations dura tion; and, the probability of skips on a long word was less than on a short one. These data are consistent with data obtained during reading in the German language (Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2015). At that, the increase of the total reading time of words in the course of their elongation took place mostly at the expense of the fixations growth.…”

“…According to our data, there was a single fixation even for long words in some children though this fixation duration was significantly longer than for reading short and mid-size words. The probability of that the subjects would generate a single fixation on the word was 42%, that is more than the proportion of single fixations in chil dren reading in the German language (Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2015). According to data obtained in the German sample, in children, unlike adults first fixation duration at a short word was longer than the first fixation on a long word, as for German children fixations typically reoccur.…”

“…Fixations shorter than 80 ms or two standard deviations longer than the average fixation duration for the whole trial were excluded from analysis. Subsequently, we excluded extremely short and long fixation duration and provided comparability of our results with those of the German colleagues (Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2015).…”

“…In addition to read ing tasks, all th e children passed neuropsychological assessment, adapted for 6-9 years olds. The analysis of eye movements was carried out in comparison w ith a similar study conducted in the German language (Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2015). Results show th a t during reading Russian children made more single fixations and skips th an German children.…”

“…Eye-movement studies of reading in children, examining length and fre quency of words are rare. In particular, a detailed research taking into consid eration these parameters was conduct ed in German-speaking 2nd grade chil dren (Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2015). A similar approach is adopted in our study.…”