Effects of inter-character spacing on saccade programming in beginning readers and dyslexics.

Effects of inter-character spacing on saccade programming in beginning readers and dyslexics. Child Neuropsychol. 2018 Aug 13;:1-25 Authors: Bellocchi S, Massendari D, Grainger J, Ducrot S Abstract The present study investigated the impact of inter-character spacing on saccade programming in beginning readers and dyslexic children. In two experiments, eye movements were recorded while dyslexic children, reading-age, and chronological-age controls, performed an oculomotor lateralized bisection task on words and strings of hashes presented either with default inter-character spacing or with extra spacing between the characters. The results of Experiment 1 showed that (1) only proficient readers had already developed highly automatized procedures for programming both left- and rightward saccades, depending on the discreteness of the stimuli and (2) children of all groups were disrupted (i.e., had trouble to land close to the beginning of the stimuli) by extra spacing between the characters of the stimuli, and particularly for stimuli presented in the left visual field. Experiment 2 was designed to disentangle the role of inter-character spacing and spatial width. Stimuli were made the same physical length in the default and extra-spacing conditions by having more characters in the default spacing condition. Our results showed that inter-letter spacing still influenced saccade programming when controlling for spatial width, thus confirmi...
Source: Child Neuropsychology - Category: Child Development Authors: Tags: Child Neuropsychol Source Type: research