Improving Eye Movement Control in Young Readers

The objective of our study is to design and evaluate an oculomotor reading aid for beginning readers. The aid consists of an eye-tracking device and a computer program that gives real-time feedback in the form of a game to the subject about their fixation position on words. An experimental study was conducted with 8-year-old children. We evaluated the effectiveness of the aid for each child by comparing the landing site distributions before and after playing the game. We found that the peak of the landing site distribution moved towards the optimal viewing position (OVP) for word identification after playing the game. We also determined that training had a positive effect on gaze duration, on the mean and distribution of number of fixations per word, and on the percentage of words with refixations in the majority of subjects.