When preview information starts to matter: Development of the perceptual span in German beginning readers

Sperlich, Anja; Schad, Daniel J.; Laubrock, Jochen

doi:10.1080/20445911.2014.993990

Cited by 50 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…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, Schad & Laubrock, 2015; see also Henderson & Ferreira, 1990). These age-related changes in the size of the perceptual span were primarily attributed to differences in processing difficulty.…”

Section: Parafoveal Preprocessing In Children and Adultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Parafoveal preprocessing of word initial trigrams during reading in adults and children.

Pagán

Blythe

Liversedge

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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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...

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Section: Parafoveal Preprocessing In Children and Adultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Parafoveal preprocessing of word initial trigrams during reading in adults and children.

Pagán

Blythe

Liversedge

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…Because intraand inter-individual sources of variance are naturally confounded (as younger children typically are also less skilled readers), it is crucial to disentangle the relative contributions of these two factors. Unfortunately, longitudinal studies are still rather rare in developmental eye-tracking research (but see Huestegge et al, 2009;Sperlich et al, 2015). Instead, the dominant research strategy has been to only assess children from one or two age groups and test whether they show the same effects as adults.…”

Section: Development Of Eye Movements In Reading: Contributions Of Thmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Unsurprisingly, therefore, there have been recent moves to study the mechanisms of children's parafoveal processing in more detail, and this topic also features prominently among the studies presented in the Special Issue. Sperlich, Schad, and Laubrock (2015) used the moving-window paradigm to investigate children's parafoveal processing in German. Adding to the previous evidence on the preprocessing of letter feature information (Rayner, 1986), they report an increase in the perceptual span during the elementary school years.…”

Section: Development Of Eye Movements In Reading: Contributions Of Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental eye-tracking research in reading: Introduction to the special issue

Schroeder

Hyönä

Liversedge

2015

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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“…They have also found that the number of letters that could be identified during a fixation (the letter identity span) was smaller for slower (for all ages included in their sample) than for faster readers. Thus, 7 to 9-year-old children were found to have a perceptual span of 3 to 4 letter spaces to the left of the fixation point 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 the fixation point in 11-year-old children (see also Sperlich, Schad & Laubrock, 2015).…”

Section: Perceptual Spanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye movements in children during reading: a review

Frey¹

2016

Actes Du Symposium International Sur La Litéracie À L’école = International Symposium for Educational Literacy (SILE/ISEL)

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Over the last decades, the analysis of eye movements has proven very useful to investigate the cognitive processes underlying reading. However, from a developmental perspective, this technique has yet hardly been used to better understand the children's acquisition of reading. This chapter aims at presenting a review of the studies comparing the eye-movement patterns observed in children with those observed in adult readers. Firstly, it presents the differences and similarities in eye-movement patterns between those two groups, and then it proposes different attempts at explaining these differences in terms of oculomotor, visual and linguistic constraints. Key words: Eye movements ; Children; ReadingRésumé : L'analyse des mouvements des yeux a été très largement utilisée ces dernières années en psychologie de la lecture pour mieux rendre compte des traitements cognitifs sous-jacents. Cependant, cette technique a été jusqu'à présent peu utilisée dans une perspective développementale, pour mieux comprendre les processus d'apprentissage et de la lecture chez les enfants. Ce chapitre présente une brève revue des études qui ont comparé les mouvements des yeux chez les enfants à ceux des adultes. Nous y décrivons dans un premier temps ce qui distingue les patterns oculaires de ces deux populations, et présentons ensuite les résultats d'études tentant d'expliquer ces différences en terme de contraintes oculomotrices, visuelles et linguistiques.

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When preview information starts to matter: Development of the perceptual span in German beginning readers

Cited by 50 publications

References 52 publications

Parafoveal preprocessing of word initial trigrams during reading in adults and children.

Parafoveal preprocessing of word initial trigrams during reading in adults and children.

Developmental eye-tracking research in reading: Introduction to the special issue

Eye movements in children during reading: a review

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