Mapping the Gaze of Poor and Good Readers in a Consistent Orthography

The present study followed a reading-level match design to investigate group differences in eye movements between grade three and grade six Greek-speaking children with reading difficulties (RD) and controls (chronological age (CA) and reading-level (RL)-matched groups), examining their performance on RAN tasks of different modalities (phonological vs. visual) and complexity levels (confounding vs. not-confounding conditions). Three eye movements (fixations, saccades, and regressions) were recorded using the EyeLink 1000 Plus eye-tracking system. The results showed that both grade three and grade six RD groups produced more and longer durations and regressions and more saccades compared to their CA controls in all tasks. However, no differences were observed between the grade six RD and the RL-matched groups in the eye-tracking measures. The present findings have important implications for determining the contribution of the reading level match design in eye-tracking reading-related research and exploring the causality of reading difficulties in consistent orthographies.