Development of the letter identity span in reading: evidence from the eye movement moving window paradigm.
By means of the moving window paradigm, we examined how many letters can be identified during a single eye fixation and whether this letter identity span changes as a function of reading skill. The results revealed that 8-year-old Finnish readers identify approximately 5 characters, 10-year-old readers identify approximately 7 characters, and 12-year-old and adult readers identify approximately 9 characters to the right of fixation. Comparison with earlier studies revealed that the letter identity span is smaller than the span for identifying letter features and that it is as wide in Finnish as in English. Furthermore, the letter identity span of faster readers of each age group was larger than that of slower readers, indicating that slower readers, unlike faster readers, allocate most of their processing resources to foveally fixated words. Finally, slower second graders were largely not disrupted by smaller windows, suggesting that their word decoding skill is not yet fully automatized.
Department of Psychology, University of Turku, FIN-20014 Turku, Finland. tuilha@utu.fi
Tuomo
T
Häikiö
Raymond
R
Bertram
Jukka
J
Hyönä
Pekka
P
Niemi
D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005387:Finland; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014794:Visual Fields / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult