Identification of Differences in Eye Movements in Early Readers with Good & Bad Reading Comprehension
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67070/evrs.isl.2026.a10Keywords:
Reading comprehension, Eye-tracking, Sentence reading, Literacy, VocabularyAbstract
Reading comprehension is a core, cross-curricular skill essential for both academic and personal contexts, preparing students for future challenges. International reports indicate a need to improve reading comprehension, but do not identify the possible causes of underperformance. One way to analyse these difficulties is through eye movements during reading. This research aims to explore whether there are differences in eye movement patterns between students with bad and good reading comprehension scores, providing a detailed comparative characterisation of reading processing according to comprehension level. A total of 106 students were assessed using a pre-test of reading comprehension (PROLEC-R), classifying students into those with low and high reading comprehension. A sample of 56 students (31 with high scores and 25 with low scores) was selected for the analysis of eye movements and vocabulary. The results indicate differences in eye movement patterns between the two groups, reflecting how real-time processing varies according to performance. They show that bad readers have a higher number of fixations and saccades, taking longer to make regressions, are slower at rereading, and take longer to identify and access the meaning of words, with a significantly smaller vocabulary. No such trend is observed in saccade amplitude and pupil diameter. These findings have significant implications for understanding difficulties in reading comprehension and contribute to improving strategies for early detection and educational intervention in reading comprehension.
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