Children's eye movement while reading picture books

Purpose: To investigate eye movement patterns in children who are reading picture books composed of both images and text. Methods: Subjects were 14 elementary school children from 9 to 11 years of age. They were asked to read a picture-book containing both images and text with an eye camera and then answer three sets of questions to check their reading experience, comprehension, recall of the text, and the contents of what they read. Results: The following hypotheses, which have their bases in previous findings, were investigated: 1) the duration of fixation is expected to be longer for images than text when a page contains both images and text; 2) eyes are expected to move from left to right as picture books are supposed to be read from left to right; and 3) scan patterns are expected to depend on the attributes of the children and the page layout. Although the duration of fixation on images and text varied amongst the children, the overall duration of fixation in pictures and on pictures was almost the same. Left to right eye movement was not found as a general trend among the subjects; rather the movement of the eye between the text areas and the image areas could be divided into two types (a "circulation model" and a "repeat model"). Finally, there was no significant relation found between scan patterns and any specific attributes of the children. There was no common pattern of reading that could be seen with all children and/or all pages, although we could see common trends for pages that had a simple layout.