Scientists from the HSE Language and Brain Center have discovered that younger students and adults, unlike their German-speaking peers, rely more on their spelling than their sound when preprocessing words while reading. The research was published in the journal Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
While reading, the human brain processes several types of information about words: their sound, visual appearance of letters, meaning, grammatical gender. At the same time, the device of the human eye allows to extract information not only from the word we are looking at when reading, but also from the neighboring word to the right. In this way, reading is faster: the reader receives information about the word on the right in advance, using peripheral vision, so that he understands its meaning sooner. This process is called preprocessing.
Researchers studied the eye movements of 56 sophomores, 48 fourth-year students, and 65 adults while reading. While the participants read 60 sentences by themselves at the computer, their eye movements were recorded with a camera. Both children and adults spent approximately the same time preprocessing the consonants “pie” and “pie”, and preprocessing the word “pleog” required significantly more time than the word with the rearranged “priog” letters.
This means that all three groups are preprocessed according to the letter information for the next word, not according to its sound.
Similar experiments in other languages have shown that when reading German, children pay attention to the sound of the word, while adults pay attention to its spelling. English-speaking readers preprocess both types of information, regardless of age.
“We expected to see sophomores new to reading use their peripheral vision to extract information about the sounds of the next word. It turned out that this was not the case. At 8 years old, children, like adults, rely on the spelling of words during preprocessing. It is easier to understand information from a word in which the letters are in the wrong order than from a consonant with it, ”says the author of the study, Vladislava Staroverova, an intern researcher at the Center for Language and Brain.
The results of the research are important for understanding how children learn to read. The discovery will help develop methods to correct reading disorders.