Abstract
Studies dealing with developmental aspects of binocular eye movement behaviour during reading are scarce. In this study we have explored binocular strategies during reading and during visual search tasks in a large population of normal young readers. Binocular eye movements were recorded using an infrared video-oculography system in sixty-nine children (aged 6 to 15) and in a group of 10 adults (aged 24 to 39). The main findings are (i) in both tasks the number of progressive saccades (to the right) and regressive saccades (to the left) decreases with age; (ii) the amplitude of progressive saccades increases with age in the reading task only; (iii) in both tasks, the duration of fixations as well as the total duration of the task decreases with age; (iv) in both tasks, the amplitude of disconjugacy recorded during and after the saccades decreases with age; (v) children are significantly more accurate in reading than in visual search after 10 years of age. Data reported here confirms and expands previous studies on children's reading. The new finding is that younger children show poorer coordination than adults, both while reading and while performing a visual search task. Both reading skills and binocular saccades coordination improve with age and children reach a similar level to adults after the age of 10. This finding is most likely related to the fact that learning mechanisms responsible for saccade yoking develop during childhood until adolescence.
Highlights
A good eye movement control, in particular saccades and fixations, is essential for reading
There was a significant effect of age in the reading task: the number of saccades decreased as age increased (R2 = 0.32, p,0.0001 and R2 = 0.21, p,0.001, respectively for the progressive and regressive saccades)
There was a significant effect of age: the amplitude of progressive saccades increased with age in the reading task (R2 = 0.17, p,0.001) but not in the visual search task (R2 = 0.0002, p = 0.90)
Summary
A good eye movement control, in particular saccades and fixations, is essential for reading. Buswell [1], Rayner [2] and McConkie et al [3] showed that younger children have longer and more frequent fixations, smaller saccades, and frequent regressive saccades (leftward saccades) In line with these findings, a review article, Levy-Schoen and O9Regan [4] reported developmental aspects of reading and they described that reading speed increased with increasing of children’s age and reading skill capabilities. Reading capabilities increase as children grow, leading to an improvement of these ocular motor performance [5] Another important difference bewteen children and adults is the so-called ‘perceptual span’ area, i.e. the section of text from which a subject can extract useful information from reading. Rayner [2] reported that this area is smaller in beginner readers than in proficient adult readers This difference is consistent within a child population: 7 year-olds process a smaller area of text during fixation than older children (11 year-olds). A reduced perceptual span has been suggested to be the cause of reading difficulties in dyslexics [6]
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