Lexical processing of children with dyslexia: An eye‐tracking adaptation of the Reicher‐ Wheeler task

Abstract

The aim of the study is to determine the relative influence of phonological and lexical knowledge on lexical processing of children with dyslexia. It is part of research of the role of phonotactics in lexical knowledge and dyslexia. The Reicher-Wheeler paradigm (Reicher, 1969; Wheeler, 1970) was adapted, and phonotactic probabilities in words (W), pseudowords (PW) and non-words (NW) were manipulated in a lexical superiority task. Both offline measures and online eye movements were recorded and analysed. The findings are discussed within the Dual-Route Model framework. The results suggest that: 1) predictably, unimpaired readers outperform children with dyslexia; 2) both groups appear not to predominately rely on lexical knowledge, whereas phonological knowledge seems to help processing only for controls; 3) phonotactic probability manipulations seem not to affect overall performance. The preliminary findings imply that dyslexia affects reading in all orthographic contexts and add further support to the findings that PW processing is particularly impeded in dyslexia (e.g. Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992), despite the transparent orthography of the Croatian language. The study additionally highlights the importance of obtaining online measures in psycholinguistic studies with atypical population.