Anna Banks and Steven Luke, Psychology

Reading to children has long been considered a critical factor in the development of their reading skill¹. However, very little research has been done on prereader children and their eye movements. Studies that have been performed show that children tend to fixate more on the illustrations in books than on the words in the books (looking at the words only 7% of the time)². Moreover, children tend to look more at illustrations of objects that are mentioned in the story³. To date there is very little research investigating whether children’s eye movements are so neatly synced to the auditory input, and none that specifically investigates the eye movements of children on a millisecond level when they are being read to. With this in mind, the purpose of the present study is to use eye tracking to study pre-readers’ early eye movements to discover how they acquire the vocabulary that is a prerequisite for later reading skill.

Forty-one children (18 female) between 3 and 5 years old (mean age 4 years, 9 months) were recruited for the study. All participants were native English speakers. Children gave assent and parents gave informed consent for participation. The visual stimuli consisted of pages from a children’s book entitled The Happy Man and His Dump Truck⁴. There were 12 pages in total. For each page, interest areas were defined encompassing the Illustrations and Text regions. In addition, individual interest areas were defined around the image corresponding to each noun phrase that was explicitly mentioned in the text (e.g. “the man”, “the pig”) and around the corresponding noun phrase in the text. Audio stimuli consisted of a female native speaker of English reading the text for each page.

The analysis on the children’s eye movements explored whether children’s eye movements are synched with the text being read. That is, are children looking at what is being talked about? Some synchrony between the eye movements of the listener and the speech of the reader must occur for vocabulary learning or enrichment to take place. An analysis of fixation latencies (the difference between the onset of the spoken noun phrase and the first fixation on the corresponding picture or written word) was conducted. Participants frequently looked at the target picture as the noun phrase was being spoken or before the next noun phrase was spoken. Words, on the other hand, were almost never fixated and, if they were, were not usually fixated when or immediately after the corresponding noun phrase was spoken (see Figure 1).

As supported by other studies, children do not look at the words in books when they are being read to; rather, they look at the pictures. Children’s eyes are synched to the auditory input that they receive, for children tend to look at pictures of the word being spoken as it is being spoken. This study supports the idea that reading to children does not influence their ability to read written words, but rather contributes to their vocabulary development.

Figure 1 – When a picture was fixated, the modal fixation latency was around 0, meaning that most fixations on a target picture occurred just as it was being mentioned or within a second before or after.

1. Huang, Y., Liang, T., & Chiu, C. (2013). Gender differences in the reading of E-books: Investigating children’s attitudes, reading behaviors and outcomes. Journal Of Educational Technology & Society, 16(4), 97-110.
2. Evans, M., & Saint-Aubin, J. (2010). An Eye for Print: Child and Adult Attention to Print During Shared Book Reading. In Literacy Development and Enhancement Across Orthographies and Cultures.
3. Evans, M., & Saint-Aubin, J. (n.d.). What Children Are Looking At During Shared Storybook Reading. Evidence From Eye Movement Monitoring. Psychological Science, 913-920.
4. Miryam. (2005). The Happy Man and His Dump Truck. (T. Girgely, Illustrator). New York, NY: Random House Children’s Books.