Mapping the Gaze of Poor and Good Readers in a Consistent Orthography: Evidence From Reading-Level Match Design

Introduction

Rapid automatized naming (RAN), broadly defined as the ability to name as fast as possible visually presented stimuli such as colors, objects, digits, and letters (Kirby et al., 2010), is a significant predictor of reading development. Likewise, it is a reliable predictor distinguishing poor from typically developing readers in every language studied thus far (e.g., Ergül et al., 2021; Landerl et al., 2019; Moll et al., 2014; Nag & Snowling, 2012; Papadopoulos et al., 2020). During the last two decades, studies investigating the rather complex relationship between RAN-reading have focused on the construct’s multi-componential nature (e.g., Papadopoulos et al., 2016) and its assessment (e.g., Georgiou et al., 2013). This focus is based on the close relationship reported between RAN-reading across different ages (e.g., Araújo et al., 2019; Caravolas et al., 2013; Georgiou et al., 2014) and ability groups (e.g., Papadopoulos et al., 2009a, 2020). More recently, the solid RAN-reading relationship has been further confirmed through neurophysiological and imaging methods. These include the use of eye-tracking (e.g., Araújo et al., 2020) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures (e.g., Al Dahhan et al., 2020), or innovative methodological approaches integrating neurophysiological and eye-gaze data (Christoforou et al., 2021). Although research employing such advanced methods shows promise to explain better RAN’s contribution to understanding reading difficulties, it has mainly focused on group differences between children with reading difficulties (RD) and their chronological age controls (CA) (e.g., Al Dahhan et al., 2014; Christoforou et al., 2021). This study aimed to go one step further and utilize a reading-level (RL) match design to investigate group differences in eye movements between Greek-speaking children with RD and controls. We examined groups’ performance on RAN tasks of different modalities (phonological vs. visual) and complexity levels (confounding vs. not-confounding condition).