Children’s Reading of Sublexical Units in Years Three to Five: A Combined Analysis of Eye-Movements and Voice Recording

ABSTRACT

Purpose

Children progress from making grapheme–phoneme connections to making grapho-syllabic connections before whole-word connections during reading development (Ehri, 2005a). More is known about the development of grapheme–phoneme connections than is known about grapho-syllabic connections. Therefore, we explored the trajectory of syllable use in English developing readers during oral reading.

Method

Fifty-one English-speaking children (mean age: 8.9 years, 55% females, 88% monolinguals) in year groups three, four, and five read aloud sentences with an embedded target word, while their eye movements and voices were recorded. The targets contained six letters and were either one or two syllables.

Result

Children in grade five had shorter gaze duration, shorter articulation duration, and larger spatial eye-voice span (EVS) than children in grade four. Children in grades three and four did not significantly differ on these measures. A syllable number effect was found for gaze duration but not for articulation duration and spatial EVS. Interestingly, one-syllable words took longer to process compared to two-syllable words, suggesting that more syllables may not always signify greater processing difficulty.

Conclusion

Overall, children are sensitive to sublexical reading units; however, due to sample and stimuli limitations, these findings should be interpreted with caution and further research conducted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository, https://osf.io/p2q45/?view_only=d64833a08f614cd5ad2423597aa725c6.

Ethics approval statement

All procedures in this study involving human participants were approved by Bournemouth University’s Ethics Committee (ID 28325) and have therefore been performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2023.2259522

Notes

1. Year rather than grade is used as the data was collected in the UK. Children in year three would have received three years of formal literacy instruction including reception year.

2. A marginal difference between the two item sets were found, therefore this factor was included in the models if it improved the model fit.

3. The offline measures in Table 1 were examined in relation to the syllable effect. Only sight word efficiency subtest of the TOWRE led to a significant interaction (see Supplemental file).

Additional information

Funding

This work was made possible by a Microsoft Corporation research grant awarded to Timothy J. Slattery, which was match funded by Bournemouth University to fund Victoria I. Adedeji’s PhD studies. Victoria currently works at the University of Leicester. Martin R. Vasilev was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship by Bournemouth University. We thank all the children, parents, and schools who gave consent to participate as well as Charley Stewart and Maríalaura Hernandez for their assistance with stimuli creation and data collection.