Contextual diversity and anchoring: Null effects on learning word forms and opposing effects on learning word meanings.

Words that appear in many contexts/topics are recognised faster than those occurring in fewer contexts. However, contextual diversity benefits are less clear in word learning studies. Mak et al.

Eye Movements of Deaf Students in Expository Versus Narrative Texts.

Text comprehension, a daily academic activity in primary and secondary school, is especially challenging for deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) students. The present study analyzed the effect of text genre (narrative vs. expository) on accuracy and eye-movement patterns during text comprehension by DHH students (ages 9-15 years) when compared to a typically hearing (TH) control group matched for chronological age.

Contextual diversity during word learning through reading benefits generalisation of learned meanings to new contexts.

From mid-childhood onwards, most new words are learned through reading. The precise meaning of many words depends upon the linguistic context in which they are encountered, which readers use to infer the appropriate interpretation. However, it is unclear what features of these linguistic contexts best support learning of new word meanings.

Does a specialist typeface affect how fluently children with and without dyslexia process letters, words, and passages?

Children with dyslexia are at risk of poor academic attainment and lower life chances if they do not receive the support they need. Alongside phonics-based interventions which already have a strong evidence base, specialist dyslexia typefaces have been offered as an additional or alternative form of support. The current study examined whether one such typeface, Dyslexie, had a benefit over a standard typeface in identifying letters, reading words, and reading passages.

Brief report: Autistic students read between lines.

Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) tend to struggle with reading comprehension, often resulting in difficulties with inference generation. While most of the previous research has focused on the product of comprehension, we report a preliminary validation of an experimental reading task in English to measure, by means of eye-movements, the time course of generating consistent and inconsistent inferences during reading. The task was tested with a group of 12 students with ASD (age range: 10-15) who showed accuracy differences between inference and control conditions.

Online inference making and comprehension monitoring in children during reading: Evidence from eye movements.

Inference generation and comprehension monitoring are essential elements of successful reading comprehension. While both improve with age and reading development, little is known about when and how children make inferences and monitor their comprehension during the reading process itself. Over two experiments, we monitored the eye movements of two groups of children (age 8-13 years) as they read short passages and answered questions that tapped local (Experiment 1) and global (Experiment 2) inferences.

Examining incidental word learning during reading in children: The role of context.

From mid-childhood onward, children learn hundreds of new words every year incidentally through reading. Yet little is known about this process and the circumstances in which vocabulary acquisition is maximized. We examined whether encountering novel words in semantically diverse, rather than semantically uniform, contexts led to better learning.

Strategies of readers with autism when responding to inferential questions: An eye-movement study.

Previous research suggests that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties with inference generation in reading tasks. However, most previous studies have examined how well children understand a text after reading or have measured on-line reading behavior without response to questions. The aim of this study was to investigate the online strategies of children and adolescents with autism during reading and at the same time responding to a question by monitoring their eye movements.

Working memory, reading ability and the effects of distance and typicality on anaphor resolution in children.

We investigated the time course of anaphor resolution in children and whether this is modulated by individual differences in working memory and reading skill. The eye movements of 30 children (10-11 years) were monitored as they read short paragraphs in which (1) the semantic typicality of an antecedent and (2) its distance in relation to an anaphor were orthogonally manipulated. Children showed effects of distance and typicality on the anaphor itself and also on the word to the right of the anaphor, suggesting that anaphoric processing begins immediately but continues after the eyes have left the anaphor.

Is children's reading "good enough"? Links between online processing and comprehension as children read syntactically ambiguous sentences.

We monitored 8- and 10-year-old children's eye movements as they read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity to obtain a detailed record of their online processing. Children showed the classic garden-path effect in online processing. Their reading was disrupted following disambiguation, relative to control sentences containing a comma to block the ambiguity, although the disruption occurred somewhat later than would be expected for mature readers.

Becoming a written word: eye movements reveal order of acquisition effects following incidental exposure to new words during silent reading.

We know that from mid-childhood onwards most new words are learned implicitly via reading; however, most word learning studies have taught novel items explicitly. We examined incidental word learning during reading by focusing on the well-documented finding that words which are acquired early in life are processed more quickly than those acquired later. Novel words were embedded in meaningful sentences and were presented to adult readers early (day 1) or later (day 2) during a five-day exposure phase.

Using E-Z Reader to examine the concurrent development of eye-movement control and reading skill.

Compared to skilled adult readers, children typically make more fixations that are longer in duration, shorter saccades, and more regressions, thus reading more slowly (Blythe & Joseph, 2011). Recent attempts to understand the reasons for these differences have discovered some similarities (e.g.

Children's and adults' on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences during reading.

While there has been a fair amount of research investigating children's syntactic processing during spoken language comprehension, and a wealth of research examining adults' syntactic processing during reading, as yet very little research has focused on syntactic processing during text reading in children. In two experiments, children and adults read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences such as, 'The boy poked the elephant with the long stick/trunk from outside the cage' in which the attachment of a prepositional phrase was manipulated.

Word length and landing position effects during reading in children and adults.

The present study examined the effects of word length on children's eye movement behaviour when other variables were carefully controlled. Importantly, the results showed that word length influenced children's reading times and fixation positions on words. Furthermore, children exhibited stronger word length effects than adults in gaze durations and refixations.

Visual information capture during fixations in reading for children and adults.

Two experiments were undertaken to examine whether there is an age-related change in the speed with which readers can capture visual information during fixations in reading. Children's and adults' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences that were presented either normally or as "disappearing text". The disappearing text manipulation had a surprisingly small effect on the children, inconsistent with the notion of an age-related change in the speed with which readers can capture visual information from the page.

Children's and adults' processing of anomaly and implausibility during reading: evidence from eye movements.

The eye movements of 24 children and 24 adults were monitored to compare how they read sentences containing plausible, implausible, and anomalous thematic relations. In the implausible condition the incongruity occurred due to the incompatibility of two objects involved in the event denoted by the main verb. In the anomalous condition the direct object of the verb was not a possible verb argument.

The binocular coordination of eye movements during reading in children and adults.

Recent evidence indicates that each eye does not always fixate the same letter during reading and there has been some suggestion that processing difficulty may influence binocular coordination. We recorded binocular eye movements from children and adults reading sentences containing a word frequency manipulation. We found disparities of significant magnitude between the two eyes for all participants, with greater disparity magnitudes in children than adults.