ИСТИНА

The study is directed to the analysis of eye movements during silent reading in Russian on early stages of acquiring this skill. For this purpose we developed the corpus of sentences that consists of 30 sentences with target words with controlled length and frequency. 37 second grade pupils (average age is 8.6 ±0.33 years old) read the sentences and performed the test of reading words with regular and irregular spelling and high and low frequency (Akhutina, 2014). We used an EyeLink 1000 eye-tracker (SR Research, Ontario, Canada). The analysis was carried out in comparison with a similar study conducted in the German language (Tiffin-Richards, Schroeder, 2015). Results showed that effects of frequency and length were similar in both languages; however Russian children made more single fixations and skips than German children. Additional analysis of the eye movements in two groups with better reading of regular or irregular words revealed that the difference in number and duration of fixations duration and fixation count in the groups support the hypothesis that the children of these groups use two different reading strategies – analytic and holistic.