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Category: Project

Description: Studies on German and English showed that children and adults can rely on phonological and orthographic information from the parafovea during reading, but this reliance differs between ages and languages. In the present study, we investigated the development of phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian-speaking 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults using gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The participants read sentences with embedded nouns which were presented in original, pseudohomophone, control for pseudohomophone, transposed-letter, and control for transposed-letter conditions in the parafoveal area, to assess phonological and orthographic preview benefit effects. The results revealed that all groups of participants relied only on orthographic but not phonological parafoveal information. These findings indicate that 8-year-old children already preprocess parafoveal information similarly to adults.