The Development Trajectory Of Perceptual Span From Second Graders To Fifth Graders

Reading is unarguably the most important skill that readers acquire during their school years.An integral part of the reading process is the eye movements that occur when we comprehend text.Perceptual span,which refers to the area from which reader can get useful information during a single fixation,is an important parameter to constructing the eye movement model of reading.Using moving window paradigm,accumulating research studying the perceptual span among children(Haikio,Bertram et al.,2009;Sperlish et al.,2017)shows that the region from which beginning readers obtain useful information is smaller than that of skilled readers,and on the other hand,the reading skill influenced the development of perceptual span.Chinese,a pictographic writing system,is different from alphabetic scripts in many aspects.There are two specific properties in Chinese:high-information density and lackness of a strong perceptual cue for word boundary.However,there has been no pertinent and systematic study to investigate the development of perceptual span from grade 2 to grade 5 for the Chinese readers so far.The present study aims to provide the basic data to construct the reading model adapted to children and to supply pedagogical implication to teachers in the domain of reading instruction.The present study,which is a 6(Reading level)×6(Condition)mixed experiment design,mainly aims to explore the development tendency of perceptual span in Chinese children.By means of moving window paradigm,we used the apparatus of Eyelink 1000 plus to collect data from 147 students from grade 2 to grade 5 in an elementary school from Tianjin.The data from 35 adult participants who were recruited randomly from an university in Tianjin was used to be as a baseline.Age-appropriate materials were used for every grade,and higher grade students needed to read the materials of grade 2.The results showed that the perceptual span varies with the increase of grades:reading speed and forward saccade amplitude become larger with the development,and the average fixation duration become more shorter with age.According to the lexical quality hypothesis supposed by Perfetti(2007),the quality of lexical representation improves with age,making the speed of lexical processing more faster in reading.Therefore,the cognitive resources devoted to foveal word processing become fewer,more cognitive resources could be attributed to the parafovea,thereby improving the efficiency for the preprocessing of upcoming words in the parafovea.With the experimental study of Chinese reading perceptual span from elementary school,we found that:(1)As the reading skill develops,the reading speed become faster,while fixation duration become shorter,and the rightward saccade amplitude become longer.(2)The perceptual span of grade 2 is 1-2 characters to the right of fixation,while grade 3 to grade 5 is 2-3 characters.(3)With development,the perceptual span become bigger,and the perceptual span develops between grade 2 through grade 3.