On the Development of Parafoveal Preprocessing: Evidence from the Incremental Boundary Paradigm

• Published in: Frontiers in psychology Vol. 7; p. 514
• Main Authors: Marx, Christina, Hutzler, Florian, Schuster, Sarah, Hawelka, Stefan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 14.04.2016
• Subjects: eye movement control during reading; incremental boundary paradigm; Psychology; reading acquisition; reading fluency; visual word recognition; visual word recognition; eye movement control during reading; reading acquisition; incremental boundary paradigm; reading fluency
• ISSN: 1664-1078; 1664-1078
• DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00514

Parafoveal preprocessing of upcoming words and the resultant preview benefit are key aspects of fluent reading. Evidence regarding the development of parafoveal preprocessing during reading acquisition, however, is scarce. The present developmental (cross-sectional) eye tracking study estimated the magnitude of parafoveal preprocessing of beginning readers with a novel variant of the classical boundary paradigm. Additionally, we assessed the association of parafoveal preprocessing with several reading-related psychometric measures. The participants were children learning to read the regular German orthography with about 1, 3, and 5 years of formal reading instruction (Grade 2, 4, and 6, respectively). We found evidence of parafoveal preprocessing in each Grade. However, an effective use of parafoveal information was related to the individual reading fluency of the participants (i.e., the reading rate expressed as words-per-minute) which substantially overlapped between the Grades. The size of the preview benefit was furthermore associated with the children's performance in rapid naming tasks and with their performance in a pseudoword reading task. The latter task assessed the children's efficiency in phonological decoding and our findings show that the best decoders exhibited the largest preview benefit.