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ABSTRACT
The current study compared eye fixation patterns during word and sentence processing in a consistent and an inconsistent alphabetic orthography. German and English children as well as adults matched on word reading ability read matched sentences while their eye fixation behavior was recorded. Results indicated that German children read in a more small-unit plodder-like style with more diligent first-pass reading and less rereading. In contrast, English children read in a more large-unit explorer-like style with a greater tendency to skip words, and more regressions. It is important that these cross-linguistic processing differences largely persisted in the adult readers. Orthographic consistency thus influences both local word recognition and global sentence processing in developing and skilled readers.
Acknowledgments
We thank Jessica Geier, Sandra Hillian-Tress, Rachel Kirmond, and Calvin Wong for their support in data acquisition and preparation.
Funding
This research was supported in part by funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013, under grant agreement number ELDEL PITN-GA-2008-215961-2) to the second author.
Notes
1 The German/English cognates used for participant matching were Kuh/cow, rot/red, Tee/tea, vier/four, Mond/moon, Bier/beer, Musik/music, sieben/seven, Hotel/hotel, Mitte/middle.
2 Mean CELEX frequencies were 12.631 per million over all German words of the sentences and 13.749 per million over all English words of the sentences (Duyck, Desmet, Verbeke, & Brysbaert, 2004), a difference that was statistically not significant, t(694) = .51, p = .61. The words not listed in CELEX (mostly names such as Eric, Suzie, etc.) made up 8.9% of all German words and 8.4% of all English words.