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On the learning trajectory of directional biases in reading: Evidence from the flankers task

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2024

Christophe Cauchi Open the ORCID record for Christophe Cauchi [Opens in a new window] ,
Jonathan Grainger  and
Bernard Lété
Christophe Cauchi*
Affiliation:
LEARN! Research Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Jonathan Grainger
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS, Marseille, France Institute for Language, Communication, and the Brain, Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence, France
Bernard Lété
Affiliation:
Laboratoire d’Étude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, Université Lumière Lyon 2, Lyon, France
*
Corresponding author: Christophe Cauchi; Email: c.cauchi@vu.nl
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Abstract

Prior research with adult participants reported a rightward bias in the reading version of the flankers task. Here, we investigated how this bias evolves as a function of reading expertise. We tested two groups of French primary school children from Cycle 2 (grades 1 and 2) and Cycle 3 (grades 4 and 5) and one group of adult participants. In the related flanker conditions, the central target word was flanked by the same word either on the left (park park ####), the right (#### park park), or on both sides (park park park). In the unrelated conditions, the repeated flanker words were replaced by a different unrelated word. In the analysis of standardized reaction times (RTs), there was a three-way interaction between the three groups of participants and the impact of flanker relatedness as a function of the position of the related flankers. This three-way interaction reflected the significantly greater increase in effects of flanker relatedness between Cycle 2 and Cycle 3 for the bilateral flanker and the right flanker conditions compared with the left flanker condition. This suggests that the rightward bias is driven by attentional asymmetries that develop during the process of learning to read.

Keywords

child typical languageflankers tasklexical processingreading developmentdirectional biases
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , First View , pp. 1 - 16
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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