关键词: 小学二年级, 知觉广度, 移动窗口, 眼动

Abstract: Perceptual span, which refers to the amount of information that can be acquired during a single fixation in reading (McConkie & Rayner,1975),provides the robust evidence of the efficiency of using parafoveal information.Chinese is a logographic language. There were studies which investigated the adults’ perceptual span of Chinese readers (Inhoff & Liu 1998; Pan, Yan, and Laubrock, 2017). There has been few studies to investigate the perceptual span of the second graders in Chinese primary school so far. The second grader is at the stage of learning to read, which is a critical period in reading development. The present study aims to provide the basic data to construct the reading model adapted to children and to supply pedagogical implication to teachers in the domain of teaching reading. The present study was 2(Grade:grade2,college students)×5(Window size:NP,L1R1,L2R2,L3R3,FL) mixed experiment design. Moving-window paradigm was used in this experiment. The Grade was between-participants design,while the window size was within-participant design.Participants were composed of 30 second graders recruited from a Tianjin elementary school and 25 undergraduates from a University in Tianjin. Six stories were made up with 60 sentences. They were chosen from different versions of Chinese textbook for grade two. Both the second graders and adult participants were asked to read the same materials. Reading fluency test and reading comprehension test were implemented for the second graders. Eyelink 1000 plus with a sampling rate of 1000HZ was used to record eye movement and to collect eye movement measures(reading rate, average fixation duration, rightward saccade amplitude). The result showed that grade 2 is more slower in reading speed compared to adults, and they have shorter rightward saccade amplitude and longer average fixation duration.The perceptual span for grade is 1-2 characters to the right of fixation. Using the median-split procedure to divide the primary students into faster readers (M=118 characters/minute)and slow readers (M=104 characters/minute) according to their reading speed in FL condition to explore the influence of reading speed on perceptual span. There is significant difference between the two groups in terms of reading speed (t=6.042, p<0.001).The result showed that the perceptual span for both groups is 1-2 characters to the right of the fixated characters. We also calculated the correlation between reading tests and eye movement measures. The result showed that there are significant correlations between reading fluency, reading comprehension and eye movement measures. Both reading speed and rightward saccade amplitude are significantly correlated with academic achievement. In conclusion, the perceptual span for second grader is 1-2 characters to the right of the fixated character while the perceptual span for the adult is larger than three characters, indicating that children may not take advantage of the parafoveal information as efficiently as the adults. Both the faster and slower readers have the same perceptual span, but there are significant differences for the two groups in terms of reading speed and rightward saccade amplitude. This may be the case that faster and slower readers could take in the same amount of information from the same region, but faster readers can process the information more effectively. Some eye movement measures are significantly related with the reading fluency, reading comprehension and academic achievement, indicating eye movement measures are related with students’ reading ability.

Key words: grade2 , perceptual span , moving-window paradigm , eye movements