Updating Of Dyslexic Children’s Representations Of Causal Relation In Chinese Narratives:An Eye-Movement Study

Reading comprehension is a dynamic process in which readers continuously construct and update situation models of the text.During text processing,the construction and updating of causal situation model could facilitate readers’understanding of the conceptual relations within the text,and thus is crucial for narrative comprehension.Developmental Dyslexia(DD)is a neurodevelopmental disorder that typically impairs a person’s decoding ability,imposing an additional burden on the working memory and thus hindering the high-level comprehension process.Against the backdrop of national reading campaign,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to investigate the high-level comprehension performance of children with DD.Therefore,this study utilized eye-tracking technology to investigate the performance of Chinese DD children in the construction and updating of causal situation models during narrative comprehension,aiming to uncover the cognitive mechanisms underlying reading deficits among children with DD.Three eye-movement experiments were implemented in this study,each with children in the DD group,children in the chronological age-matched group(CA group,i.e.,age-matched to the dyslexia group),and children in the reading levelmatched group(RL group,i.e.,reading level-matched to the dyslexia group)as participants.The representations of causal relation(i.e.,the situation model)were obtained through inference-making during the process of text comprehension.Experiment 1 compared the reading performance of participants in explicit and inferential texts to examine the construction of causal representations in children with DD.Specifically,the experiment investigated whether the participants could generate bridging inferences online during their Chinese narrative comprehension and whether DD children exhibit difficulties in inferential processing.The results of Experiment 1 showed that:(a)the total reading time of the target sentence in inference version was significantly longer than that in explicit version;with respect to the reading time(including total gaze duration,first fixation duration,total fixation duration)of the target words in comprehension questions,no significant difference between the two versions was observed.The response time of the inference narrative comprehension question was not significantly longer than that of the explicit version,indicating that all three groups could activate the bridging inference online in later stages of text processing;(b)the DD group consumed more processing resources in both types of texts than did the CA group.As reflected in the indicators of reading speed,reading efficiency,first reading time,second reading time,total reading time,average reading time,and fixation counts,the DD group performed significantly worse in inferential processing than the CA group but exhibited similar performance to the RL group.Experiment 2 investigated whether the three groups are capable of updating their causal situation models in working memory online under two types of narrative discourse processing tasks,and whether DD children exhibit difficulties in updating processing.Each experimental discourse consisted of five sentences,and judging from whether the fourth sentence supports the causal inference of the first two sentences or not,the experimental discourse were divided into two versions:consistent and inconsistent.The results showed that:(a)greater first reading time,second reading time,total reading time,average duration of fixations and more fixation counts were observed for the inconsistent version compared to the consistent one,indicating that all the groups were able to update the causal situation model online from the initial processing.In addition,the spillover effect was found both in the first reading time and total reading duration on the post-target sentence;and(b)no significant difference was observed in the extent of updating outcome among the groups.In terms of reading time,the results also showed that DD group had significantly longer first-pass reading time,total reading time,and average fixation duration on both types of text compared to the CA and RL groups.Moreover,the inconsistent version also significantly increased the number of fixations of the DD group but not the CA group.These results indicated that children with DD had impaired situation model updating ability during local context processing.Experiment 3 adopted the same experimental paradigm as Experiment 2 but with the number of filler sentences in each text being augmented up to 4.This modification aimed to further investigate the online updating process when the causal relation representations were retained in readers’ long-term memory and whether the DD group exhibit any reading difficulties during the updating process.The main findings of the present study were as follows:(a)second reading time,total reading time,and fixation counts in the inconsistent version were significantly higher than those in the consistent version,indicating that all three groups of participants were capable of updating the causal situation model during later processing of the target sentence.Furthermore,the spillover effect was not observed on the post-target sentence;and(b)all three groups of participants exhibited consistent eye movement pattern.However,the DD group,compared with the CA group,showed less extent of causal shift during comprehension task,typically unveiling deficiencies in the global updating of the situation model representation.With eye-tracking technology,this study explored the inferential processing and the mechanism of updating situation models during Chinese narrative comprehension among DD children.The findings deepen the understanding of internal mechanisms underlying the construction and updating of the causal situation model,contributing to the improvement of the information processing theories of text comprehension.Furthermore,the study provides supporting evidence for the difficulties in high-level comprehension processes for children with DD.Accordingly,a situation construction and updating model for children with DD during text reading comprehension was proposed,which elaborates the internal cognitive mechanism of inference and mental model updating precisely.Finally,some intervention measures were pointed out to provide guidance for future studies in this field.