Eye Movements During Reading in Russian-speaking Children with Dyslexia

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Dyslexia is a developmental reading disability that impedes reading fluency and text comprehension (Benfatto et al., 2016) and is believed to stem from phonological deficit, visual attention span deficit or a combination of both (Zoubrinetsky et al. 2014). Previous eye-tracking studies showed that children with dyslexia struggled most during reading longer and less frequent words (Dürrwächter et al., 2010), refixated words more often (Jainta & Kapoula, 2011), and made more saccades (Kirkby et al., 2008) than their typically developing peers. However, a detailed understanding of the influence of phonological deficit on eye movements during reading in children with dyslexia is missing. This study aimed to investigate the influence of phonological skills and word properties on eye movements during reading in Russian children with phonological dyslexia compared to the control group of typically developing children.
Primary school students with diagnosed phonological dyslexia (N = 29, mean age = 9.5) and typically developing controls (N = 47, mean age = 8.5) participated in our study. We ensured that all controls read normally according to the Standardized Assessment of Reading Skills in Russian (Kornev, 1997). Phonological processing skills were assessed using the Russian Test of Phonological Processing (RuToPP; Dorofeeva et al., 2019). In the eye-tracking experiment, all children silently read 30 sentences comprising the child version of the Russian Sentence Corpus (Laurinavichyute et al., 2019) while their eye movements were recorded. The analysis was performed using linear mixed regressions. We estimated word properties (word length, word frequency, word class, morphological complexity), amplitude of the incoming saccade, participants’ properties (grade, group, performance in RuToPP), and the interaction between group and all the other predictors. We controlled for length and frequency of the previous and the upcoming words.
Overall children with dyslexia read slower than controls, but were more likely to skip a word (p=0.003). Older children read faster, however, this effect was less prominent in children with dyslexia (p=0.02). Children with dyslexia spent more time on longer words compared to controls (p=0.01). We also found that greater amplitude of the incoming saccade correlated with shorter reading time, which was amplified for children with dyslexia (p<0.001). Difficulties with the most complex phonological task in RuToPP correlated with longer fixations, which was more prominent in children with dyslexia (p=0.05).
The amplified effect of the amplitude of the incoming saccade in children with dyslexia shows that they rely on targeting the optimal landing position in a word for efficient processing more than controls. Difficulty with the complex phonological task in RuToPP could indicate that impaired complex phonological processing prevented children with dyslexia from reading effectively. Only the effect of word length strongly distinguished between children with dyslexia and controls, whereas the effects of other word properties require further investigation.

Authors

• Sofya Goldina, National Research University Higher School of Economics
  Presenting Author

• Anastasiya Lopukhina, HSE University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anna Laurinavichyute, HSE University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Olga Dragoy, HSE University
  Non-Presenting Author