Sublexical Effects on Eye Movements During Repeated Reading of Words and Pseudowords in Finnish

Abstract

Sublexical effectS on eye movementS during repeated reading of wordS and pSeudowordS in finniSh the role of different orthographic units (letters, syllables, words) in reading of orthographically transparent finnish language was studied by independently manipulating the number of letters (nol) and syllables (noS) in words and pseudowords and by recording eye movements during repeated reading aloud of these items. fluent adult readers showed evidence for using larger orthographic units in (pseudo)word recoding, whereas dysfluent children seem to be stuck in a letter-based decoding strategy, as lexicality and item repetition decreased the nol effect only among adult readers. the noS manipulation produced weak repetition effects in both groups. however, dysfluent children showed evidence for word-specific knowledge by making fewer fixations on words than pseudowords; moreover, repetition effects were more noticeable for words than pseudowords, as indexed by shortened average fixation durations on words due to item repetition. the number of fixations was generally reduced by repetition among dysfluent children, suggesting familiarity-based benefits perhaps at the perceptual level of processing.

Breaking down the word length effect on readers’ eye movements

“…Since reading speed was not consistently associated with the effect of spatial width on temporal eye movement measures, we conclude that crowding was not related to reading fluency in our sample of adult readers. In contrast to several developmental studies (De Luca et al, 1999;Hautala, Hyönä, Aro, & Lyytinen, 2011;Hutzler & Wimmer, 2004;Hyönä & Olson, 1995), but in line with a study with adult readers with dyslexia (Hawelka et al, 2010), dysfluent readers showed only insignificant trends towards a larger NrL effect. However, this is not to say that specific visual or letter-processing deficits could not be found in a subgroup of individuals with dyslexia suffering from problems in visual processing (Bellocchi et al, 2013) or generally in readers who are more affected than the dysfluent readers studied here.…”

“…Keywords: reading fluency; eye movements; word length; crowding; word skipping Longer words require more time to be recognised (e.g., Balota, Cortese, Sergent-Marshall, Spieler, & Yap, 2004;New, 2006; see Barton, Hanif, Eklinder Björnström, & Hills, 2014 for a recent review), which is pronounced in developmental dyslexia (e.g., De Luca, Di Pace, Judica, Spinelli, & Zoccolotti, 1999;Hautala, Aro, Eklund, Lerkkanen, & Lyytinen, 2013;Hautala, Hyönä, Aro, & Lyytinen, 2011;Ziegler, Perry, Ma-Wyatt, Ladner, & Schulte-Körne, 2003). Generally, the temporal word length effect has been thought to stem from linguistic-attentional processing.…”

“…Reading is partly serial phonological decoding, a skill that becomes automatic during elementary school (Zoccolotti, De Luca, Di Filippo, Judica, & Martelli, 2009) but remains difficult for children with developmental dyslexia (Share, 1995;Wimmer, 1993Wimmer, , 1996aZoccolotti, De Luca, Di Pace, Gasperini, & Spinelli, 2005). When reading short words, the word length effects (New, 2006) of a single fixation Hautala, Hyönä, Aro, & Lyytinen, 2011) may also reflect attentional serial letter processing during word recognition (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001;Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007; see especially Hawelka, Gagl, & Wimmer, 2010). In addition, problems in phonological decoding or whole-word recognition may explain the difficulty with reading that children with developmental dyslexia experience and their distinctive eye movement behaviour during reading, including longer fixations, more frequent refixations and regressions and shorter saccades (see Bellocchi, Muneaux, Bastien-Toniazzo, & Ducrot, 2013, for a recent review).…”

Dual-stage and dual-deficit? Word recognition processes during text reading across the reading fluency continuum

“…However, it is far from clear how this core deficit affects the development of visual word recognition processes. According to the prevalent view, deficient learning of G-P associations impairs phonological decoding and self-teaching of new words resulting in an impoverished orthographic lexicon (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2018;Araújo & Faísca, 2019;Blomert, 2011;Conway et al, 2017;Dürrwächter et al, 2010;Hautala et al, 2011b;Hyönä & Olson, 1995;Mehlhase et al, 2019;Perry et al, 2019;Richlan, 2019;Saksida et al, 2016;Share, 2008). In the dual-route framework, such a limited orthographic lexicon should lead to (1) a larger WL effect due to a higher probability of a word being read by the indirect route and (2) a stronger WF × WL interaction due to having orthographic word representations only for the most frequent words.…”

Gaze Position Reveals Impaired Attentional Shift during Visual Word Recognition in Dysfluent Readers

“…Serial decoding of letters is crucial for early reading development and for reading novel words; repeated exposure to the same words is assumed to strengthen orthographic word representations, thus providing a basis for whole-word recognition [31] – [35] . Readers with developmental dyslexia show prolonged reliance on serial decoding even in real-word reading [36] – [39] and seem to attain whole-word recognition skills only in adolescence [40] , [41] . Moreover, adult readers with dyslexia seem to be substantially slow in reading long pseudo-words [40] , which suggest a permanent inefficiency in the phonological, serial reading procedure.…”