Improving Saccadic Eye Movements In Young And Poor Readers

International audience ; The initial saccade (ILP) of experienced readers lands preferentially halfway between the beginning and the middle of words, at the position originally called the Preferred Viewing Location (PVL). Our study examined whether a simple physical manipulation, namely the saliency (brightness) of the character located at the PVL, exerts a positive influence on the saccadic computation system. An eye-movement study was conducted with adults and 8-year-old children performing a lateralized lexical decision task. We found that this manipulation had no effect on the location of the ILPs for proficient readers (characterised by ILPs most of the time at the PVL), demonstrating the irrelevance of enhanced PVL saliency for readers having developed automatized routines for saccade computation. But it did act to move the peak of the landing site distribution towards the PVL for the cluster of participants with immature saccade targeting strategy (characterised by ILPs near the words’ beginning and lowest reading level scores) or increased oculomotor instability (characterised by flattened and diffuse LP-curves and visual-processing deficits). These results suggest that attracting the eye towards the PVL could represent a new way to help reading.