The role of reading skills and word features in reading derived nouns: an eye-movement study with primary-school children

Several studies proved that detecting morphemic constituents in long strings of letters leads to a reduction of latency and of error rates in reading aloud derived nouns and pseudo-derived non-words. Such effects are particularly evident in children with dyslexia, who struggle to process long stimuli as a whole. In this study we used eye-movement recording to get evidence of the complex interplay between base- and whole-word processing in reading aloud derived nouns. Sixty-two typically developing children, attending 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, were asked to read derived words in a sentence context. Target words were 41 nouns derived from noun bases (e.g., umorista, ‘humorist’). Data showed that base and word frequency affected early phases of word processing (first fixation duration), but in an opposite way: Base frequency had a facilitative effect on first fixation, whereas word frequency exerted an inhibitory effect. These results were interpreted as a competition between early accessed base words (e.g., camino, ‘chimney’) and target words (e.g., caminetto, ‘fireplace’). Such competition has been still observed in the later stages of processing (gaze duration) only for children with low level of reading proficiency (more than 2 SD below norms). In these children, the higher base frequency is, the longer the gaze duration. Data on first fixation duration confirms that base word works as an effective head start; however, results from gaze duration suggest that, for children with low-proficiency, difficulty in accessing base+suffix combination can slow down whole-word production.