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Exploring the eye‐movement patterns as Chinese children read texts: a developmental perspective
Author(s) -
Chen Minglei,
Ko Hwawei
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of research in reading
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.077
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9817
pISSN - 0141-0423
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9817.2010.01441.x
Subject(s) - eye movement , psychology , perspective (graphical) , reading (process) , fixation (population genetics) , narrative , linguistics , word lists by frequency , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , sociology , population , philosophy , demography , neuroscience , sentence
This study was to investigate Chinese children's eye patterns while reading different text genres from a developmental perspective. Eye movements were recorded while children in the second through sixth grades read two expository texts and two narrative texts. Across passages, overall word frequency was not significantly different between the two genres. Results showed that all children had longer fixation durations for low‐frequency words. They also had longer fixation durations on content words. These results indicate that children adopted a word‐based processing strategy like skilled readers do. However, only older children's rereading times were affected by genre. Overall, eye‐movement patterns of older children reported in this study are in accordance with those of skilled Chinese readers, but younger children are more likely to be responsive to word characteristics than text level when reading a Chinese text.