Saccadic movements during reading of text in children and university professors considered good readers

Abstract

The present study evaluated 4-grade children and university professors considered good readers in a computerized test of textreading. Trajectories of eye movements obtained during reading made possible to compare the two groups regarding the number of regressivesaccades; type of regressive saccade - that could be intra-word or inter-word; and grammatical classification of words that suffered regression.Results show that children presented a higher number of regressive saccades than university professors. Both groups carried out more inter-wordregressions to the word immediately antecedent to the last fixation than intra-word regressions. The two groups carried out more intra-wordsregressive saccades in the following word types: nouns, adjectives and verbs. Regressions to the previous word took place principally in wordcouples conjunction-verb, adjective-noun, and preposition-noun. On the whole, good readers carry out fewer regressive saccades than childrenin the process of literacy, but the standard of regressive saccades and the type of words that suffer regression are similar in the two groups.Also a higher number of regressive saccades was observed in the beginning of each line of the text, which can be explained by paraphovealprocessing in reading. Regressions to the previous word may be related to the fact that, depending on the grammatical class of the word, thereis a higher possibility of its not fixed.