Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examined how enlarging the font size from a regular size that young children were typically exposed to affected their reading performance and eye movement behavior. We showed that making the font size larger than a regular size impaired word pronunciation accuracy. This impairment was associated with non-verbal IQ but not changes in eye movement behavior, suggesting that it may be more related to the development of font-size dependent perceptual representations of words than information extraction strategies. The font size change also decreased children’s gaze transition consistency among words during sentence reading, suggesting that it interfered with eye movement planning for implementing and developing visual routines for reading. These results suggested that young children may have initially developed font-size dependent perceptual representations for words and for eye movement planning during sentence reading before forming font-size independent reading behavior as observed in adults through increasing reading experiences with different font sizes.