Sentential structure and the perceptual span in normal reading development.

An eye-voice span paradigm was adopted to determine whether children use different aspects of sentence structure to facilitate decoding early in the course of reading development. Eighty-four Grade 1 and Grade 2 children, representing four levels of early reading competence, and 15 skilled adult subjects read from four textual conditions; materials varied in the extent to which the texts were semantically and/or syntactically constrained. The more precocious the young reader, the longer his reported span. The better readers' and the adults' advantage was greater the more linguistically constrained the reading material. These data support a continuous model of reading development and are compatible with an interactive definition of early reading behavior.