Eye-Movement Components Underlying Children’s Passage Reading

A key goal of reading instruction is to develop efficient silent reading. However, the cognitive processes that support this development are not fully understood. Eye-movements are commonly used to index many of the cognitive subprocesses that support reading (e.g., word recognition). However, eye-movement control may also be a critical independent component. Traditional passage reading eye-movement (PREM) indices, such as first fixation duration and regressions (Rayner, 1997), change with age, yet we do not yet have a comprehensive picture of how individual differences in reading and reading-related skills in emerging readers link to differences in these PREM indices. This study asked how age, reading abilities, oral language, and efficient lexical access (assessed with the Visual World Paradigm) contribute to variation in children’s PREMs. We tested 212 English-speaking children (107 male, 105 female; Grade: M = 4.00, SD = 0.76) who silently read passages taken from the Test of Reading Comprehension – 4th Edition (Brown et al., 2009). Commonality analyses revealed that decoding and efficient lexical access accounted for significant variance across multiple PREM indices, while age only uniquely predicted shorter word reading times. A principal component analysis identified three distinct reading dimensions to PREM control—methodical, disorganized, and disengaged. This suggests that these aspects of eye-movements may assemble in complex ways to support reading. These patterns together explained 26% of the variance in reading fluency. This suggests that gains in word recognition efficiency may be critical to the development of efficient reading, alongside general gains in control of eye-movements during reading. Keywords: passage reading, eye movements, reading, development, word recognition, visual world paradigm