Attention-language interface in Multilingual Assessment instrument for Narratives.

The current study employed the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to test comprehension of narrative macrostructure in Russian in a visual world eye-tracking paradigm. The four MAIN visual narratives are structurally similar and question referents' goals and internal states (IS). Previous research revealed that children's MAIN comprehension differed among the four narratives in German, Swedish, Russian, and Turkish, but it is not clear why. We tested whether the difference in comprehension was (a) present, (b) caused by complicated inferences in understanding IS compared with goals, and (c) ameliorated by orienting visual attention to the referents whose IS was critical for accurate comprehension. Our findings confirmed (a) and (b) but found no effect of attentional cues on accuracy for (c). The multidimensional theory of narrative organization of children's knowledge of macrostructure needs to consider the type of inferences necessary for IS that are influenced by subjective interpretation and reasoning.

Eye movement corpora in Adyghe and Russian: an eye-tracking study of sentence reading in bilinguals.

The present study expands the eye-tracking-while reading research toward less studied languages of different typological classes (polysynthetic Adyghe vs. synthetic Russian) that use a Cyrillic script. In the corpus reading data from the two languages, we confirmed the widely studied effects of word frequency and word length on eye movements in Adyghe-Russian bilingual individuals for both languages. We also confirmed morphological effects in Adyghe reading (part-of-speech class and the number of lexical affixes) that were previously shown in some morphologically-rich languages. Importantly, we demonstrated that bilinguals' reading in Adyghe does differ quantitatively (the effect of language on reading times) and qualitatively (different effects of landing and previous/upcoming words on the eye movements within a current word) from their reading in Russian.

Cross-linguistic comparison in reading sentences of uniform length: Visual-perceptual demands override readers' experience.

Accurate saccadic targeting is critical for efficient reading and is driven by the sensory input under the eye-gaze. Yet whether a reader's experience with the distributional properties of their written language also influences saccadic targeting is an open debate. This study of Russian sentence reading follows Cutter et al.'s (2017) study in English and presents readers with sentences consisting of words of the same length. We hypothesised that if the readers' experience matters as per discrete control account, Russian readers would produce longer saccades and farther landing positions than the ones produced by English readers. On the contrary, if the saccadic targeting is primarily driven by the immediate perceptual demands that override readers' experience as per the dynamic adjustment account, the saccades of Russian and English readers would be of the same length, resulting in similar landing positions. The results in both Cutter et al. and the present study provided evidence for the latter account: Russian readers showed rapid and accurate adjustment of saccade lengths and landing positions to the highly constrained input. Crucially, the saccade lengths and landing positions did not differ between English and Russian readers even in the cross-linguistically length-matched stimuli.

Does early exposure to spoken and sign language affect reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult signers?

Introduction: Early linguistic background, and in particular, access to language, lays the foundation of future reading skills in deaf and hard-of-hearing signers. The current study aims to estimate the impact of two factors - early access to sign and/or spoken language - on reading fluency in deaf and hard-of-hearing adult Russian Sign Language speakers. Methods: In the eye-tracking experiment, 26 deaf and 14 hard-of-hearing native Russian Sign Language speakers read 144 sentences from the Russian Sentence Corpus. Analysis of global eye-movement trajectories (scanpaths) was used to identify clusters of typical reading trajectories. The role of early access to sign and spoken language as well as vocabulary size as predictors of the more fluent reading pattern was tested. Results: Hard-of-hearing signers with early access to sign language read more fluently than those who were exposed to sign language later in life or deaf signers without access to speech sounds. No association between early access to spoken language and reading fluency was found. Discussion: Our results suggest a unique advantage for the hard-of-hearing individuals from having early access to both sign and spoken language and support the existing claims that early exposure to sign language is beneficial not only for deaf but also for hard-of-hearing children.

Global reading processes in children with high risk of dyslexia: a scanpath analysis.

The study presents the first systematic comparison of the global reading processes via scanpath analysis in Russian-speaking children with and without reading difficulties. First, we compared basic eye-movement characteristics in reading sentences in two groups of children in grades 1 to 5 (N = 72 in high risk of developmental dyslexia group and N = 72 in the control group). Next, using the scanpath method, we investigated which global reading processes these children adopt to read the entire sentence and how these processes differ between the groups. Finally, we were interested in the timeframe of the change in the global reading processes from the 1st to the 5th grades for both groups. We found that the main difference in word-level measures between groups was the reading speed reflected in fixation durations. However, the examination of the five identified global reading processes revealed qualitative similarities in reading patterns between groups. Children in the control group progressed quickly and by the 4th grade engaged in an adult-like fluent reading process. The high-risk group started with the beginner reading process, then similar to first graders in the control group, engaged mostly in the intermediate and upper-intermediate reading processes in 2nd to 4th grades. They reach the advanced process in the 5th grade, the same pattern preferred by the control group second graders. Overall, the scanpath analysis reveals that although there are quantitative differences in the word-level eye-tracking measures between groups, qualitatively children in the high-risk group read on par with typically developing peers but with a 3-year reading delay.