Rapid Coding of Syllable Structure by Dysfluent Developing Readers

ABSTRACT Purpose The present study investigated whether the number of syllables affects developing readers’ word recognition when controlling for word length and word frequency and, if so, whether the effect is dependent on reading fluency. The target language was Finnish, a language with a transparent orthography and a simple syllable structure. Method Eye movements of 142 third and fourth graders were recorded during silent reading of two stories. Reading fluency was assessed separately. For analyses, a data subset containing words of a certain length (6,7,9 letters) and varying syllable number (2,3,4 syllables) was extracted from the data set. Using linear mixed-effects modeling, the effect of the syllable number on various eye-tracking measures across different levels of reading fluency was studied. Results Results revealed a statistically significant, impeding number of syllables effect in first fixation duration but non-significant effects in the later reading measures. Furthermore, fluent and dysfluent readers did not differ regarding the number of syllables effect. Conclusion These findings suggest that in Finnish developing readers, syllabic parsing is a highly rapid and automatized process, which predominantly takes place during the early holistic orthographic processing of a word, and that qualitatively similar orthographic processing occurs in fluent and dysfluent beginning readers.