Eye movement and Chinese character recognition among preschool children in Hong Kong

Abstract

Eye movement patterns such as saccades, fixations, and scan paths can provide valuable insights into the cognitive processes engaged during object recognition. Previous research studies on the development of visual routines and perceptual expertise have shown that more experienced individuals develop more consistent eye movement patterns as they become more skilled in a particular domain, such as face recognition and text reading. These findings from eye movement studies on face recognition and text reading suggest that children with different Chinese character recognition abilities may also differ in the consistency and location of their eye fixations when recognizing characters, as Chinese characters are logographic and they share common properties with faces (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009). This study explored if the eye movement patterns are different between preschool children with better and weaker character recognition abilities making use of the Hidden Markov Modelling approach for eye movement data analysis. The results showed that young learners exhibited more consistent eye movement performed better in a character recognition task. Moreover, children with better character recognition ability focused more on the left of characters. However, children’s eye movement patterns did not differ when they read real and pseudo-characters. Findings shed light on the possibility of adopting eye tracking technique as a tool for dyslexia screening and providing instructions to enhance young children Chinese character recognition ability.