Children's Eye-Movements During Reading Reflect the Quality of Lexical Representations: An Individual Differences Approach

The lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) suggests that skilled reading requires high-quality lexical representations. In children, these representations are still developing, and it has been suggested that this development leads to more adult-like eye-movement behavior during the reading of connected text. To test this idea, a set of young adolescents (aged 11-13 years) completed a standardized measure of lexical quality and then participated in 3 eye movement tasks: reading, scene search, and pseudoreading. The richness of participants' lexical representations predicted a variety of eye-movement behaviors in reading. Further, the influence of lexical quality was domain specific: Fixation durations in reading diverged from the other tasks as lexical quality increased. These findings suggest that eye movements become increasingly tuned to written language processing as lexical representations become more accurate and detailed.