Diagnosing Reading Disorders based on Eye Movements during Natural Reading

Abstract

Diagnosing reading disorders involves complex procedures to evaluate complex cognitive processes. For an accurate diagnosis, a series of tests and evaluations by human experts are required. In this study, we propose a quantitative tool to diagnose reading disorders based on natural reading behaviors using minimal human input. The eye movements of the third-and fourth-grade students were recorded while they read a text at their own pace. Seven machine learning models were used to evaluate the gaze patterns of the words in the presented text and classify the students as normal or having a reading disorder. The accuracy of the machine learning-based diagnosis was measured using the diagnosis by human experts as the ground truth. The highest accuracy of 0.8 was achieved by the support vector machine and random forest classifiers. This result demonstrated that machine learningbased automated diagnosis could substitute for the traditional diagnosis of reading disorders and enable large-scale screening for students at an early age.