Children's visual word recognition is hampered by adjacent stimuli

Although skilled readers make use of information about words adjacent to the fixated word, developing readers are known to be limited in their uptake of parafoveal information, leading to the expectation that they may be entirely insensitive to the presence of adjacent stimuli. However, lack of benefit from nearby items does not imply that those items cannot negatively impact the recognition process. Here we report two experiments with 62 Norwegian children attending Grade 2 and 141 in Grade 5 using a modified version of the visual world paradigm with masked flanked visual word targets. Compared to a baseline condition with no flankers, we found that the presence of flanking words or unfamiliar-font strings interfered with lexical activation of the foveated target word; in contrast, strings of repeated symbols had no effect. The results were very similar for the two grades, except that the more advanced readers also exhibited an interaction of flanking condition with target word frequency, specifically, smaller frequency effects when flanked by words; these were interpreted as foveal load effects. The findings indicate that adjacent stimuli are to some extent simultaneously processed along with the foveated word and strongly interfere with it, from the earliest stages and throughout reading development. We propose that management of interference from adjacent words is a major factor modulating the development and expression of reading skill.