ИСТИНА

An analysis of reading-related eye movements is helpful in uncovering the cognitive structure of the reading skill. There are different views on the role of various cognitive functions, such as executive functions or the processing of visual-spatial and auditory information when reading. In order to investigate how the relative contributions of these functions into the reading skill change in a course of development we analyzed eye movements during reading in schoolchildren of the second and third grades. A total 75 of second and 56 third graders participated in the study. Every child read a corpus of sentences, which has been developed for eye-tracking studies of reading in Russian children. All children were also assessed neuropsychologically in order to estimate their individual states of executive functions and functions of visuospatial and auditory information processing. We correlated the number of fixations and their duration with the results of neuropsychological assessment in two age groups (second and third graders) separately. This analysis showed that (i) in both groups the executive functions scores correlated with numbers of fixations and their durations, (ii) the visuospatial information processing scores are statistically related to eye movements only in the group of second graders, but not in the group of third graders, and (iii) on the contrary, the auditory information processing correlated with the reading-related eye movements in the third graders, but not in the second graders. The obtained results suggest that the cognitive structure of reading skill does change over the age period we studied.