Eye movements in shared book reading with children from kindergarten to Grade 4

Previous studies have revealed that preschool-age children who are not yet readers pay little attention to written text in a shared book reading situation (see Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2005). The current study was aimed at investigating the constancy of these results across reading development, by monitoring eye movements in shared book reading, for children from kindergarten to Grade 4. Children were read books of three difficulty levels. The results revealed a higher proportion of time, a higher proportion of landing positions, and a higher proportion of reading-like saccades on the text as grade level increased and as reading skills improved. More precisely, there was a link between the difficulty of the material and attention to text. Children spent more time on a text that was within their reading abilities than when the book difficulty exceeded their reading skills.