Parafoveal processing of letters and letter-like forms in prereaders growing up in a left-to-right or a right-to-left writing convention

Abstract

abstractThe aim of this study was to test that the ability to obtain information about more than one letter at a glance develops prior to conventional reading. This study included 55 Dutch-speaking prereaders (mean age 63.56 months, SD = 6.55) and 45 Hebrew-speaking prereaders (mean age = 66.71 months, SD = 8.35). In a perceptual span task, one letter was projected in the fovea, the other to the right or to the left, at a distance of 4 or 6 letters from the center letter. A second perceptual span task included letter-like forms instead of letters. Eye-tracking was used to control whether children fixated on the center letter or letter-like form during the task. Obtaining information about two letters/forms was easier when the parafoveally projected letter/form was projected to the right for both Hebrew and Dutch children. Hemispheric dominance and not the dominant reading direction (right to left in Hebrew and left to right in Dutch) may explain this preference for right, which may mean that left-to-right reading is easier to learn than right-to-left reading. We did find, nevertheless, some evidence that reading direction in the dominant orthography affected how children divided attention over letters.