An Eye-Tracking Study on Reading Comprehension and Reading Processing in Children with Reading Difficulties according to Story Type and Processing Load

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate differences in reading performance between two groups of children, children with reading difficulties (RD) and typically developing children (TD), depending on story types and length of given text. To comprehensively evaluate children's reading ability, both offline and online processing were taken into consideration, and chunking skill was measured to explore the relationship between working memory and reading comprehension. Methods: Twenty-six children (11 with RD and 15 with TD) in 3rd to 4th grade of elementary school participated in this study. Two experimental tasks were conducted: a reading comprehension task using an eye-tracker and a word list recall task. While reading the text, children's eye movements were analyzed to identify online reading processing. After they finished reading, they were asked to answer the offline reading comprehension questions. Results:There were significant differences in reading comprehension depending on the group, the story type, and the level of processing load. For the fixation, there was an interaction effect between the group and the story type. Also, as a result of heat map analysis, the fixation of the RD group was evenly distributed throughout the texts given at low processing load. In addition, as a result of correlation analysis, there was a significant difference in patterns of using chunking skills in reading comprehension between the two groups. Conclusion:This study has a clinical implication in that it suggested that presenting reading materials concisely could be one of the ways to improve reading comprehension in the RD group.