Specifics of Children's Oculomotor Activity while Reading Texts with Various Visual Formatting

Currently, eye movements during the reading process are viewed as a reflection of complex cognitive processes associated with the perception of the text, its semantic analysis and information processing, that is, as an indicator of human cognitive processes. Difficulties in learning, that children encounter, are often correlated not only by imperfect cognitive abilities, but also by the lack of visual perception. It is noted that visual perception is one of the most sensitive and integrative indicators for evaluating the development of a young child in a primary school, and the deficit of the visual perception maturation has the greatest impact on the process of learning how to read. At the same time, immaturity of the visual perception as a whole and its individual components creates specific learning problems. The purpose of the study was to identify the parameters of the oculomotor activity, which indicate the development of reading skills. The task was to find the most optimal visual format for displaying a text. The study involved 95 second grade students: 55 children without reading disabilities and 40 children with dyslexia. Subjects were given a task to read out loud stimuli texts. A total of five stimuli were used, the volume of each was around 55 words: standard text, illustrated text, text on a black background, text with syllables highlighted in colour, text with a shortened line length. In the process of reading, eye movements were recorded. The study revealed statistically significant differences in the spatial-temporal parameters of the oculomotor activity of children with dyslexia and children without reading disabilities. Second grade students with dyslexia are characterized by a greater number of fixations, a smaller amplitude of saccades and a larger ratio of regressive saccades to progressive ones. The data obtained allows to judge that children with dyslexia utilize a sublexical reading route and are at the stage of a syllable-reading. Second grade students without any reading disabilities, on the contrary, show the development of synthetic reading and mastering of the lexical reading route. Illustrated text is shown to be less effective for reading; illustrations act as an additional distractor and interfere with the readers who have poorly developed reading skills. The segmentation into syllables, on the contrary, improves the quality of reading. Since children with dyslexia have difficulties in recoding syllable units and synthetic reading, the recognition of complete words for them is inefficient and requires more cognitive resources, which slows down reading and negatively affects reading comprehension. One of the effective ways to segment into syllables is to highlight them with the colour based on the similarity principle of gestaltism.