Researchers from the HSE Language and Brain Center have shed light on a surprising pattern: younger readers and adults tend to rely more on the visual shape of letters than on the sounds of a word when preprocessing it during reading, a distinction that differs from their German-speaking peers. The discovery appears in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology and adds an important piece to how we understand reading development across languages and ages.
During reading, the brain assembles several kinds of information about words. It interprets sound, decodes the visual form of letters, grasps meaning, and even notes grammatical gender in some languages. At the same time, the eye gathers information not just from the word currently in focus but also from the next word to the right. This peripheral preview lets readers anticipate upcoming content, speeding up comprehension. This anticipatory mechanism is known as preprocessing and is a fundamental feature of fluent reading across many languages.
The study tracked eye movements from 56 sophomores, 48 fourth-year students, and 65 adults as they read a series of 60 sentences on a computer screen. A camera recorded their gaze to capture where attention landed and how long each word took to be preprocessed. Across all age groups, participants spent roughly the same time preprocessing the consonants in the next word and the entire word itself. Interestingly, the word formed by the letters “pleog” required noticeably more processing time than the word formed with the letters in the rearranged order “priog.” This result underscores how sensitive readers are to letter arrangement and its impact on word recognition, regardless of experience or age.
The closer interpretation is that all three groups prepare in a way that prioritizes letter information for the upcoming word rather than focusing primarily on how the word sounds. In other words, the brain’s preprocessing stage is guided more by orthography than phonology in this cross-age sample, at least in the tested contexts.
Parallel research in other languages paints a nuanced picture. In German, for example, children tend to attend more to how a word sounds, while adults shift to a focus on its spelling when preprocessing. In contrast, readers of English tend to engage both phonological and orthographic cues during preprocessing, without a pronounced shift across age. These cross-linguistic findings reveal that preprocessing strategies may adapt to language-specific writing systems and developmental stages, rather than following a single universal pattern. This mosaic of results invites further inquiry into how learning environments and literacy instruction shape underlying reading mechanisms over time.
“We expected to observe sophomores just beginning to read using their peripheral vision to glean sound information from the next word,” notes Vladislava Staroverova, the study’s lead author and an intern researcher at the Center for Language and Brain. “What we found was quite different. By age eight, children who are new readers, like adults, rely on the spelling of words during preprocessing. It even appears easier to process information from a word where the letters are scrambled than from a consonant combined with the correct order.” The observations from this study contribute a clearer view of how early readers approach the reading task and highlight a fundamental reliance on orthographic cues that persists into adulthood in many contexts.
The implications of these findings extend beyond basic science. They offer valuable clues for educators and clinicians aiming to support children who struggle with reading. By understanding how preprocessing operates in different languages and at various ages, specialists can tailor strategies that align with the brain’s natural tendencies to use orthography during the initial stages of word recognition. In practical terms, this research may guide the development of more effective interventions for reading disorders, helping learners build stronger literacy foundations that carry into higher grades and everyday reading tasks.