Attention to the fine-grained aspect of words in the environment emerges in preschool children with high reading ability

ABSTRACT Attention to words is closely related to the process of learning to read. However, it remains unclear how attention to words in environmental print (such as words on product labels) is changed with the growth of preschool children’s reading ability. We thus used eye tracking technique to compare attention to words in environmental print in children at low (32, 15 males, 5.12 years) and high (32, 17 males, 5.16 years) reading levels during a free viewing task. To characterize which aspects of visual word form children attend to, we constructed three types of stimuli embedded in the same context: words in environment print, symbol strings (similar shape to words but without strokes), and character strings (comparable with words in the number of strokes and the structures). We observed that children at both reading levels showed lower percentages of fixations and fixation time in words relative to symbol strings, suggesting they start to attend to the coarse aspect of visual word form. Interestingly, only children at higher reading level showed lower percentages of fixations and fixation time for words relative to character strings, suggesting that attention to the fine-grained aspect of visual word form emerged, and was closely to reading ability.