title: Letter names and alphabet book reading by senior kindergarteners: an eye movement study.
abstract: The study monitored the eye movements of twenty 5-year-old children while reading an alphabet book to examine the manner in which the letters, words, and pictures were fixated and the relation of attention to print to alphabetic knowledge. Children attended little to the print, took longer to first fixate print than illustrations, and labeled fewer letters than when presented with letters in isolation. After controlling for receptive vocabulary, regressions revealed that children knowing more letters were quicker to look at the featured letter on a page and spent more time looking at the featured letter, the word, and its first letter. Thus, alphabet books along with letter knowledge may facilitate entrance into the partial alphabetic stage of word recognition.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada N1G 2W1. evans@psy.uoguelph.ca
authors.forename: Mary Ann
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Evans
authors.forename: Jean
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Saint-Aubin
authors.forename: Nadine
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Landry
mesh_terms: D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012438:Saccades; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary