TY  - JOUR
TI  - Silent Reading in Russian Primary Schoolchildren: an Eye Tracking Study
T2  - Psychology. Journal of Higher School of Economics
IS  - Psychology. Journal of Higher School of Economics
KW  - silent reading
KW  - eye movements
KW  - children
KW  - length effect
KW  - frequency effect
KW  - neuropsychology
AB  - The study investigates silent reading in the Russian language during the early stages of acquiring this skill by employing the method of eye tracking. For this purpose we developed the corpus  consisting of 30 sentences with target words with controlled length and frequency. Second grade pupils (n = 37; average age is 8.6 ± 0.33 years old) participated in the study. In addition to reading tasks, all the children passed neuropsychological assessment, adapted for 6-9 years olds. The analysis of eye movements was carried out in comparison with a similar study conducted in the German language (Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2015). Results show that during reading Russian children made more single fixations and skips than German children. However effects of frequency and length were similar in the both languages. Based on neuropsychological scores we distinguished three groups of children: (1) with the weakness of visual and visual-spatial information processing, (2) with the weakness of kinesthetic and auditory information processing and (3) without these weaknesses. The comparison of eye tracking indices for the three groups showed that children with low scores on visual and visual-spatial processing  generated more and longer fixations than the children of the two other groups. The obtained data do not contradict the dual route models of word recognition, but require for their specification new researches.
AU  - Aleksei Korneev
AU  - Ekaterina Matveeva
AU  - Tat'yana Akhutina
UR  - https://psy-journal.hse.ru/en/2017-14-2/207750172.html
PY  - 2017
SP  - 219-235
VL  - 14