Processing of adapted texts by Russian-speaking secondary schoolchildren with general speech underdevelopment. Handling the reading skills of the children with language disorders is one the main problems of correctional pedagogy (Bezrukih, 2000; Rusetskaya, 2009). Studies of dyslexia — a disorder characterized by troubled reading despite normal intelligence — are of high priority. Existing studies are mainly focused on investigating the reading process in primary school children, while adults and secondary school students are o en le outside the research interest (Kornev, 2003; Akhutina, 2006; Inshakova, 2008). Moreover, there is no experimental evidence for di erent text types processing in children with language-related problems.
This study is one of the rst eye-tracking experiments on Russian language material. It explores how children read and comprehend texts with various types of adaptation, namely one and the same text in lexical adaptation (replacement of complex and rare words to more common ones), and grammatical adaptation (simpli ed complex syntactic structures and sentences). To examine this issue, 32 Russian secondary school students from the correctional school No 3 (Saint Petersburg, Russia) were involved in the experiment. In a preliminary study, their reading skills were checked (Kornev, Ishimova, 2010), the subjective opinions of their teachers and speech therapists were collected and, as a result, the participants were divided into two groups: “good readers” and “poor readers”. In the main 30 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference «Neurobiology of Speech and Language» experiment, the students’ eye movements were measured by Eyelink 1000+ during reading of 2 stimuli: a lexically adapted text and a grammatically adapted text on two di erent stories. Both versions of each text were equalized by the level of complexity via the http://readability.io/ resource.
e text comprehension and accessibility were controlled by the questions regarding the text and scaling method. e participants had to evaluate the level of di culty while reading. e outcome has shown that there is no signi cant di erence in processing (i.e. the total dwell time, the total xation count, average saccade amplitude, average duration of the rst pass and the number of regressions) and comprehension of lexically adapted and grammatically adapted texts: both types of adaptation proved to be e cient for recalling the information for both good and poor readers. We can conclude that the processing of lexis and grammar goes in parallel ways, none of them are “decisive”.
Supported by RFBR grant No 18-00-00640.