Immaturity of Oculomotor Capabilities During a Reading Task in Children Born Prematurely: An Eye Tracker Study

Abstract

To our knowledge, there are no studies recording the reading eye movements of children born prematurely. We examined the oculomotor patterns during reading of 23 children born prematurely ( M age = 7.8, SD = 0.2 years) to compare them with those from two groups of children born at full-term who were matched for chronological age or reading age, respectively. We found the oculomotor reading pattern in children who were preterm to be similar to that of children who were full-term and matched for reading age; this shared pattern was characterized by longer duration of fixations, frequent prosaccades of smaller amplitude and several backward saccades. In contrast, when these two groups were compared to full-term children matched for chronological age, the latter group showed significantly shorter duration of fixations, less frequent saccades and larger amplitude prosaccades. Thus, the oculomotor pattern we observed in 7-year-old children who were either preterm or reading-delayed, relative to their age-matched peers, reflected delayed development of brain areas involved in reading-related eye movements.

Eye-Movements in a Text Reading Task: A Comparison of Preterm Children, Children with Dyslexia and Typical Readers

“…Indeed, preterm children had shorter fixations, both with respect to control children and, particularly, to the dyslexic group. Our results differed from [ 20 ], as they found an opposite trend with a longer duration of fixations in preterm and full-term reading age-matched children compared to the chronological age-matched children group. In addition, the two first groups also showed a higher number of pro- and backward saccades and a higher amplitude of pro-saccades compared to the latter group, suggesting an immature development of brain areas in preterm children compared to their chronological age peers.…”

“…Our study is explorative concerning the eye-movement pattern of preterm children in silent reading as only one study has been carried out on this issue [ 20 ]. Our results revealed a pattern similar to that of children with typical development except for the duration of fixations.…”

“…Concerning preterm children, a fascinating insight comes from the study of [ 20 ], who compared, for the first time, analysis of reading and eye tracker in preterm children (7.8 years old) with groups of full-term children matched for chronological age (first group) or reading age (second group). Results suggested no differences in the oculomotor pattern between preterm and full-term reading age-matched children.…”

“…Results suggested no differences in the oculomotor pattern between preterm and full-term reading age-matched children. In contrast, full-term chronological age-matched children showed shorter fixations, less frequent saccades, and larger prosaccades amplitude compared to the other groups, suggesting that the development of the brain areas is immature in the preterm population for their chronological age [ 20 ]. Some studies on typical populations indicate that reflexive movements, such as ocular following, are not age-related [ 21 ], but there are no studies on preterm populations at this regard.…”

“…Indeed, two studies have compared preterm children, children with dyslexia, and typically developing children in reading tasks [ 9 , 11 ] without analyzing eye movements. In addition, only one study investigated eye movements in the preterm population compared to control groups without including the comparison with children with dyslexia [ 20 ]. The main aim was to compare preterm children at the end of primary school with typically developing children and children with a diagnosis of dyslexia during silent reading of two short texts, analyzing their speed and their attentional indexes collected with eye-tracker (number of fixations, duration of fixations, number of saccades, amplitude of saccades, number of regressions).…”