Eye Movements of Children and Adults Reading in Three Different Orthographies

In this study, we investigated developmental aspects of eye movements during reading of three languages (English, German and Finnish) that vary widely in their orthographic complexity and predictability . Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules are rather complex in English and German but relatively simple in Finnish. Despite their differences in complexity, the rules in German and Finnish are highly predictable, whereas English has many exceptions. Comparing eye movement development in these three languages, thus, allows us to investigate whether orthographic complexity and predictability have separate effects on eye movement development. Three groups of children, matched on years of reading instruction, along with a group of proficient adult readers in each language were tested. All participants read stimulus materials that were carefully translated and back-translated across all three languages. The length and frequency of 48 target words were manipulated experimentally within the stimulus set. For children, word length effects were stronger in Finnish and German than in English. In addition, in English effects of word frequency were weaker and only present for short words . Generally, English children showed a qualitatively different reading pattern, while German and Finnish children’s reading behavior was rather similar. These results indicate that the predictability of an orthographic system is more important than its complexity for children’s reading development . Adults’ reading behavior, in contrast, was remarkably similar across languages. Our results, thus, demonstrate that eye movements are sensitive to language-specific features in children’s reading, but become more homogenous as reading skill matures

The role of positional information during reading in children and adults

Despite a large body of evidence investigating how letter-position information is encoded during lexical-processing during both isolated-word and reading paradigms, it is still not clear whether the mechanism to encode letter-position information is modulated by age and/or reading ability. The aim of the present research was to investigate developmental changes in letter-position encoding during reading. The first experiment investigated the influence of letter-position encoding on the time course of lexical and post-lexical processing during reading. It examined whether the prior exposure of a word’s transposed-letter neighbour (TLN) earlier in the same sentence interfered with that word identification in skilled-adult-readers. Results showed that in skilled-readers, TLNs caused a target words’ misidentification, triggering post-lexical strategies of checking. The second experiment investigated whether children extracted letter-position information independently from letter-identity information from the parafovea as adults do. Results showed that although children had longer reading times overall than adults, both adults and children pre-processed orthographic information from the parafovea and encoded letter-position information using a spatial coding mechanism. Finally, the third experiment examined whether children’s reading ability influenced letter-position encoding during lexical-processing in reading. Adults, skilled and less-skilled child readers read sentences with words containing two letters-transposed (positions 1&2, 1&3 and 2&3). Results showed that words with transposed-letters in position 13 caused the most disruption to reading, while words with transposed-letters in position 23 caused the least disruption to reading in both adults and skilled child readers. Less skilled child readers showed that although they showed disruption when identifying transposed-letters nonwords, the cost did not vary systematically depending on the letter-position. This suggests that less skilled child readers with fewer, high-quality lexical representations were activating phonological codes for word identification via the fine-grained route. In contrast, both adults and skilled child readers with more, high quality lexical representations were activating orthographic codes for word identification via the coarse-grained route

The influence of item-level contextual history on lexical and semantic judgments by children and adults.

Semantic diversity quantifies the similarity in the content of contexts a word has been experienced in. Four experiments investigated its effect on lexical and semantic judgments in 9- to 10-year-olds and adults. In Experiment 1, a cross-modal semantic judgment task, participants decided whether a visually presented word matched an audio definition. Both groups were slower to respond to words high in semantic diversity, and this effect was modulated by task demands. Experiment 2 used the same items but in a lexical-decision task. Children were faster to respond to words high in diversity but there was no effect in adults, failing to replicate previous work. Experiment 3 examined possible reasons for this, and Experiment 4 tested the effect of semantic diversity on lexical decision via secondary analysis of 2 large megastudies. Overall, the facilitative effect of semantic diversity on lexical decision was robust. Our findings show that contextual experience influences subsequent lexical processing, consistent with context inducing semantic representations that reflect continuities and gradations in meaning. These gradations are captured by semantic diversity, and in turn, this interacts with task demands to influence behavioral performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved