Before new readers can move from Dr. Seuss to Doctor Zhivago, it's not only their vocabulary and appreciation of the Russian aesthetic that have to mature. Young eyes just don't move across words as easily as older eyes do. Like Thing One and Thing Two, the eyes bounce around independently and cause disorder.
The difference is in saccades, the little horizontal or vertical hops that ratchet our eyes through sentences. French researchers Magali Seassau of e(ye)BRAIN and Maria-Pia Bucci of Hôpital Robert Debré have been studying how this system develops in kids, including those with dyslexia.
For their latest study, the authors gathered 69 kids ages 6 to 15, as well as 10 adults. While using an eye-tracking device, the subjects silently read a paragraph of text from an age-targeted book. (Experimenters asked questions afterward to make sure the kids had actually read it.) In a separate task, subjects were ...
