Eye Movement Analyses for Obtaining Readability Formula for Latvian Texts for Primary School

Abstract

To determine the difficulty of text, readability formulas can be used. The research was made to find readability formula for Latvian. Readability formulas for English were used as guidelines. The novelty was the use of eye movement tracking during reading to obtain quantitative data that lead to readability formula. Eye fixation durations were gathered during readability measurements. Average values of fixation durations were calculated to characterize texts and readers. 15 texts with various difficulty levels were composed for exposing them to readers. More than 300 children of grades 1 - 4 were participating in measurements. Average values of eye fixation durations of “readers from a certain grade while reading a certain text” were used to find their correlation with values of several English readability formulas. It was found that good correlation occurs with Spache readability formula (R=0.74), which is used for evaluation of primary-grade reading materials in English. It was found that percentage of hard words is the central parameter that determines the difficulty of texts for primary school.