Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007;White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the preprocessing of letter identity and position information of a parafoveal word's initial trigram by adults and children using the boundary paradigm during normal sentence reading. Seven previews were generated: Identity (captain); transposed letter and substituted letter nonwords in Positions 1 and 2 (acptain-imptain); 1 and 3 (pactain-gartain), and 2 and 3 (cpatain-cgotain). Results showed a transposed letter effect (TLE) in Position 13 for gaze duration in the pretarget word; and TLE in Positions 12 and 23 but not in Position 13 in the target word for both adults and children. These findings suggest that children, similar to adults, extract letter identity and position information flexibly using a spatial coding mechanism; supporting isolated word recognition models such as SOLAR (Davis, 1999(Davis, , 2010 and SERIOL (Whitney, 2001) models.Keywords: letter position encoding, parafoveal preview, eye movements, childrenThe purpose of this study was to examine how letter identity and position information are encoded during lexical identification in sentence reading by children and adults. Specifically, in this study, parafoveal preprocessing of letter identity and position information in a word's initial trigram by children and adults during silent sentence reading was explored. Parafoveal Preprocessing in Children and AdultsResearch in parafoveal preprocessing in adults, using gazecontingent change paradigms (McConkie & Rayner, 1975;Rayner, 1975), has shown that readers not only process the fixated word but also extract some visual and linguistic information from the next word in the sentence, before it is directly fixated (see Schotter, Angele, & Rayner, 2012 for a review). Studies using the moving window paradigm have shown that in skilled readers, the effective visual field in reading (the perceptual span) extends over an asymmetrical area from 3-4 characters spaces to the left of the fixated word to 14 -15 character spaces to the right of fixation in alphabetic languages (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). Word identification occurs in the area closest to fixation (between 3 and 4 letters to the left and 6 or 7 letters to the right of fixation; Rayner & Bertera, 1979;Rayner, Inhoff, Morrison, Slowiaczek, & Bertera, 1981).With respect to the size of the effective visual field in reading for children, studies have shown that the perceptual span increases with age. Thus, 7-to 9-year-old children were found to have a perceptual span of 3 to 4 letter spaces to the left of fixation and 11 letters to the right; while the span was 3 to 4 letters spaces to the left and 14 letters to the right of fixation in 11-year-old children (Häikiö, Bertram, Hyönä & Niemi, 2009;Rayner, 1986;Sperlich, Sch...

We examined whether variations in contextual diversity, spacing, and retrieval practice influenced how well adults learned new words from reading experience. Eye movements were recorded as adults read novel words embedded in sentences. In the learning phase, unfamiliar words were presented either in the same sentence repeated four times (same context) or in four different sentences (diverse context). Spacing was manipulated by presenting the sentences under distributed or non‐distributed practice. After learning, half of the participants were asked to retrieve the new words, and half had an extra exposure to the new words. Although words experienced in diverse contexts were acquired more slowly during learning, they enjoyed a greater benefit of learning at immediate posttest. Distributed practice also slowed learning, but no benefit was observed at posttest. Although participants who had an extra exposure showed the greatest learning benefit overall, learning also benefited from retrieval opportunity, when words were experienced in diverse contexts. These findings demonstrate that variation in the content and structure of the learning environment impacts on word learning via reading.

In this experiment, the extent to which beginning readers process phonology during lexical identification in silent sentence reading was investigated. The eye movements of children aged seven to nine years and adults were recorded as they read sentences containing either a correctly spelled target word (e.g., girl), a pseudohomophone (e.g., gerl), or a spelling control (e.g., garl). Both children and adults showed a benefit from the valid phonology of the pseudohomophone, compared to the spelling control during reading. This indicates that children as young as seven years old exhibit relatively skilled phonological processing during reading, despite having moved past the use of overt phonological decoding strategies. In addition, in comparison to adults, children's lexical processing was more disrupted by the presence of spelling errors, suggesting a developmental change in the relative dependence upon phonological and orthographic processing in lexical identification during silent sentence reading.

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 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 demonstrate that eye movements are sensitive to language-specific features in children's reading, but become more homogenous as reading skill matures.