ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN COGNITIVE-LINGUISTIC SKILLS AND OCULOMOTOR PATTERNS IN SENTENCE READING
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Abstract
This study examined how executive functions and cognitive-linguistic skills relate to online lexical processing during sentence reading as a function of word frequency, word length, and concreteness in 171 first- and second-grade children. Executive functions (interference, verbal working memory, and fluency) and linguistic abilities (vocabulary, Rapid Automatized Naming, and phonological awareness) were assessed and linked to two oculomotor indices of word processing, namely First Fixation Duration (FFD) and Total Fixation Duration (TFD), computed for six lexical areas of interest, using descriptive analyses and regression models. Children processed high-frequency words more efficiently than low-frequency words in both FFD and TFD. Early efficiency was associated with fluency and phonological awareness (PA), whereas later efficiency was linked to interference control. Although long words descriptively elicited longer fixations, neither age nor cognitive and linguistic skills significantly predicted differences in FFD or TFD, suggesting that word length was not a reliable predictor of lexical processing efficiency in this task. No consistent advantage was found for concrete over abstract words. Abstract words imposed greater demands during the initial stages of processing (FFD), but these differences diminished in TFD and were not explained by cognitive or linguistic skills. Taken together, these findings provide preliminary evidence that lexical processing efficiency in emergent readers may depend more strongly on word familiarity and on cognitive and linguistic skills than on word length or concreteness, highlighting the interaction between stimulus properties and individual competencies in early reading. However, the findings should be interpreted with caution, as they are task-specific and based on limited item sampling, with only one item representing each lexical category.
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