Eye Movement Study On The Influence Of Illustrations On Stories Reading In 5-year-old Children

Early reading has been playing a crucial role in children's cognitive ability and later growth of reading and writing abilities.Illustrations as an important part of picture story book serve a lot of functions in children's early reading.In this study,we aimed to investigate the influence of the number and size of the illustrations in children's reading comprehension.Eye movement method was used to examine the process of story reading in 5-year-old children.The main measures we selected were first fixation,total fixation duration and number of fixations.The experiment adopted 2*3 two factors mixed experimental design,independent variables is the degree of difficulty(difficult and easy)and features illustrations(picture number,picture size),after the experiment selects the first fixation time,fixation times,total fixation time and access time of four eye movement indicators,through analysis and discuss the results.The results showed that:(1)The degree of story's familiarities influences children's comprehension of story reading.More attention sources were occupied when the content of story is less familiar to the children;(2)It is better for children to understand the stories in which fewer pictures were included;(3)Larger size of illustration made children pay much more attention on story reading.Those results suggest that size and number of illustrations are two important aspects of story book which are worth more studies to focus on in the future.This study,along with previous related studies,demonstrated the importance of illustrations in story reading in children.