An Exploratory Study: What Can Eye-Movements Tell Us About Phonological Awareness in Children with Intellectual Disabilities?

Word decoding as a foundational reading skill is significantly associated with phonological awareness in children with typical development as well as children with intellectual disabilities. Phonological awareness is often assessed using traditional behavioral methods, which may underestimate abilities, particularly in individuals who are difficult to test due to behavioral, communication, or attentional difficulties. This study tested whether an eye-tracking “looking-while-listening” paradigm provides an additional recording option which is appropriate and potentially informative to examine the cognitive process while solving phonological awareness tasks in the assessment of children with intellectual disabilities. Fifty-nine children with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities (aged 8–14 years) completed sound, syllable, and phoneme blending and segmentation tasks in paper-based and eye-tracking formats. Participants were classified as proficient or non-proficient based on behavioral performance in the paper-based format. Eye-tracking indices included proportional fixation duration, counts, revisits, and duration of the initial fixation (first fixation) on target, phonologically similar, and distractor images. Proficient participants showed a higher proportional total fixation duration and a higher frequency of fixation on target images, as well as greater attention to phonologically similar competitors than distractors, compared to non-proficient participants, who showed no such differentiation. The findings which we obtained in our exploratory study suggest that eye tracking is a feasible, process-oriented method for assessing phonological awareness in children with intellectual disabilities and may capture cognitive mechanisms not reflected in traditional assessment procedures. This assumption should be pursued further through carefully designed experimental studies.