Lexical processing in children and adults during word copying

Abstract

Copying text may seem trivial, but the task itself is psychologically complex. It involves a series of sequential visual and cognitive processes, which must be co-ordinated; these include visual encoding, mental representation and written production. To investigate the time course of word processing during copying, we recorded eye movements of adults and children as they hand-copied isolated words presented on a classroom board. Longer and lower frequency words extended adults' encoding durations, suggesting whole word encoding. Only children's short word encoding was extended by lower frequency. Though children spent more time encoding long words compared to short words, gaze durations for long words were extended similarly for high- and low-frequency words. This suggested that for long words children used partial word representations and encoded multiple sublexical units rather than single whole words. Piecemeal word representation underpinned copying longer words in children, but reliance on partial word representations was not shown in adult readers.

Keywords :

• Children
• Copying
• Eye tracking
• Reading
• Working memory

We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Visual angle between adults and children differed as children needed to sit nearer the board in order to ensure that when the head was lifted for encoding, eye movements were still fully trackable. The difference in how effective the eye tracker was at tracking adults compared to children arose due to differences in their height.