Eye-Movement Components Underlying Children’s Passage Reading

A key goal of children’s reading instruction is to develop efficient silent reading. However, the cognitive processes that support this development are not fully understood. Eye-movement control is both a critical component and an index of skilled silent reading. Traditional eye-movement indices during passage reading (PREM), such as first fixation duration and regressions (Rayner, 1997), change with age. Yet, the cognitive subskills contributing to these changes remain unspecified. This study examined how age, efficient lexical access from the Visual World Paradigm, language and reading abilities contribute to changes in children’s PREMs from 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 efficient lexical access and decoding 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 patterns from PREM indices—methodical, disorganized, and disengaged—which are not specified in existing reading models such as the Simple View (Hoover & Gough, 1990) or DIER (Kim, 2017). These patterns together explained 26% of the variance in reading fluency. Findings suggest that eye movements relate to key components of reading development, including efficient lexical access, decoding and age, and can be reduced into distinct patterns that uniquely predict reading ability. Eye movements are therefore a valuable tool for examining the development of cognitive processes that underlie efficient silent reading in children.