Eye-movements during Reading in Children with Hearing Loss

Reading is a complex cognitive skill that plays an important role in the life of every individual. In this study, we analyze eye-tracking data for a unique group of readers – primary school children with hearing loss. We compare their eye-movements with a control group of typically developing children without hearing loss and a group of children with dyslexia of similar age. These three groups of children read the same set of 33 sentences and answered 10 simple comprehension questions while their eye-movements were tracked. Moreover, the children with hearing loss additionally took part in a visual search experiment assessing their parafoveal preview efficiency, IQ test based on Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices and in an online vocabulary test (the data collection is ongoing). The comparison of eye-movements revealed that children with hearing loss use the same reading patterns as hearing efficient readers. Due to the developed peripheral vision and greater parafoveal preview, they display higher probability of skipping a word, their average saccade landing position is closer to the center of the word (hence, to the optimal viewing position), and they have lower probability of fixating a word more than once. Our participants with hearing loss slowed down on longer words less frequently than the hearing, and had shorter reading times – in particular, shorter single fixation durations and gaze durations. Unexpectedly, they also had high comprehension question response accuracy. They got 87% of right answers, while typically developing children without hearing loss and children with dyslexia gave 94% and 83% respectively. As for the visual search task, we had the data for only one participant and no data for control group of typically developing children due to the pandemic restrictions. We are going to collect the data for our target group of children with hearing loss (target = 15) and data for the control group of hearing (target = 15). The results of vocabulary test supported our assumption about the low proficiency level in spoken Russian language in hearing-impaired children. All participants demonstrated significantly lower results in this test than their peers without hearing loss. As for Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices, two our participants who completed the test had normal nonverbal intelligence. Both of them had the results even higher than the average value for their age. This combination of high results for Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices and extremely low results of vocabulary test for children with hearing loss demonstrates that children with hearing loss have nonverbal intelligence on the same level as typically developing children at the same age. It means that the results of the vocabulary test do not come from lower nonverbal intelligence.