‘Reading and comprehending simple sentences: an exploratory study in children with intellectual disabilities using eye tracking methods’

Reading proficiency can be subdivided in decoding words and reading comprehension of sentences or text. This exploratory eye-tracking study investigated sentence reading and comprehension processes in 59 children with intellectual disabilities aged 8 to 14 years. Mean non-verbal IQ was 57.81 (SD = 10.44). Participants completed a computerised text–picture matching task consisting of four items, in which they read short sentences and selected the picture matching the sentence meaning while their eye movements were recorded. Based on performance in a subsequent paper-based version of the same task, children were classified into successful readers (‘comprehenders’) and emergent readers (‘poor comprehenders’). Results of group comparisons showed that successful readers exhibited longer first fixation durations on sentence words, more frequent fixations and revisits and total proportional fixation duration compared to emergent readers. Furthermore, repeated-measures ANOVAs demonstrated that successful readers also showed significantly greater visual attention to target pictures and longer proportional fixation duration on semantically related distractors compared to unrelated distractors, while emergent readers showed no differentiation between picture types. These findings suggest that eye-tracking measures capture meaningful differences in the allocation of visual attention as an indicator associated with sentence comprehension in children with intellectual disabilities.