Exploring factors influencing children’s eye movements during solving morphological tasks in an agglutinative language with rich morphology

This study examines how children’s eye movements reflect the development of reading skills when solving morphological tasks in Hungarian, an agglutinative language with a transparent orthography and a rich morphology. Using an eye-tracker, we observed 41 students in grades 2–4 as they completed sentences with real words and nonwords. We analyzed the number and duration of fixations to explore developmental differences and the influence of word frequency, length, and morphological complexity. Our results revealed clear developmental trends: both the number and length of fixations decreased with age, indicating more efficient reading processes by grade 4. Nonwords consistently elicited more fixations and longer processing times than real words, reflecting greater reliance on metalinguistic and morphological skills. Word length and frequency also significantly influenced eye movements, with longer and less frequent words requiring a greater cognitive effort. Taken together, these patterns are consistent with accounts emphasizing that task-related cognitive resources may support efficient processing during morphological decision-making, although working memory was not directly measured in the present study. Interpreted through the E-Z Reader and SWIFT models, the findings support theories of increasing lexical efficiency and distributed attention during reading development. The study’s originality lies in combining eye-tracking with morphological tasks in Hungarian, contributing new insights from a less frequently studied orthography. These results demonstrate that eye movements can serve as sensitive indicators of reading development and cognitive-linguistic skills. Practically, they suggest that eye-tracking has a diagnostic potential for identifying developmental patterns and reading difficulties, offering valuable implications for reading instruction and early intervention.