Eye movements by good and poor readers during reading of regular and phrase-segmented texts

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to examine how eye movements during reading of regular and phrase-segmented texts vary with reading performance. Each participant read a set of either regularly formatted or phrase-segmented texts as eye movements were monitored. Each text was followed by a set of comprehension questions. The effects of individual differences (high- vs. low-performance readers) and text formatting (regular vs. phrase-segmented) were investigated by examination of readers' eye movement patterns. Previous research has revealed that poor readers' performance on tasks that require syntactic processing differs from that of good readers', and that poor readers' comprehension and reading rate improves when presented with phrase-segmented text. It was hypothesized that high- and low-performance readers' eye movements would differ during regular text reading in replication of previous research, and that furthermore low-performance readers' eye movements while reading phrase-segmented text would resemble those of high-performance readers' in the same condition. Results revealed differences between high- and low-performance readers' eye movements for regular texts, but not for phrase-segmented texts. This was due to changes in eye movement measures across text conditions for low-performance readers only.