Eye Movements of French Dyslexic Adults While Reading Texts: Evidence of Word Length, Lexical Frequency, Consistency and Grammatical Category.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Dyslexia, a learning disability affecting reading, has been extensively studied using eye movements. This study aimed to examine in the same design the effects of different psycholinguistic variables, i.e., grammatical category, lexical frequency, word length and orthographic consistency on eye movement patterns during reading in adults.

METHODS

We compared the eye movements of forty university students, twenty with and twenty without dyslexia while they read aloud a meaningful and a meaningless text in order to examine whether semantic context could enhance their reading strategy.

RESULTS

Dyslexic participants made more reading errors and had longer reading time particularly with the meaningless text, suggesting an increased reliance on the semantic context to enhance their reading strategy. They also made more progressive and regressive fixations while reading the two texts. Similar results were found when examining grammatical categories. These findings suggest a reduced visuo-attentional span and reliance on a serial decoding approach during reading, likely based on grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Furthermore, in the whole text analysis, there was no difference in fixation duration between the groups. However, when examining word length, only the control group exhibited a distinction between longer and shorter words. No significant group differences emerged for word frequency. Importantly, multiple regression analyses revealed that orthographic consistency predicted fixation durations only in the control group, suggesting that dyslexic readers were less sensitive to phonological regularities-possibly due to underlying phonological deficits.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings suggest the involvement of both phonological and visuo-attentional deficits in dyslexia. Combined remediation strategies may enhance dyslexic individuals' performance in phonological and visuo-attentional tasks.