Anastasia Kaprielova at the internation conference IMPRS: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Language Sciences

This year, IMPRS: the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Language Sciences focused on two themes (Language Disorders and Memory & Learning) and explored them from multiple viewpoints, such as genetics, psychology, neurobiology, linguistics and computer science. Alongside the keynotes, short talks and discussion sessions, attendees had the opportunity to present their own work during the poster sessions. Furthermore, there also were various workshops on research methods and data analysis on offer.

Anastasia Kaprielova presented the research that focuses on a unique group of readers – primary school children with hearing loss (or deaf). The study was done under supervision of Anna Laurinavichyute. The authors compared the eye-movements of children with hearing loss with those of control group of typically developing children without hearing loss.

The comparison of eye-movements between children with hearing loss and the control group has shown 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, the saccade landing position is closer to the center of the word, and they have lower probability of fixating a word more than once. At the same time, they had high comprehension question response accuracy. The children with hearing loss additionally took part in a visual task experiment, Raven's Progressive Matrices, and an online vocabulary test (the data collection is ongoing).


Eye-movements during reading in children with hearing loss (PDF, 314 Kb)