Dr. Kenn Apel and students involved in his Research on Orthographic Learning Lab (ROLL) are expanding their research into early indicators of literacy learning risks with a project that investigates children’s eye movement during storybook reading.

For some time, Dr. Apel has been investigating whether young children in the early stages of reading acquire quickly the mental images of written words (mental orthographic representations, or MORs) during storybook reading. Results of his initial studies suggest that kindergarten children quickly acquire some MOR information and that this ability uniquely predicts their reading and spelling skills, above other known contributors.

Other researchers have investigated children’s eye gaze during storybook reading and have found that children devote minimal amount of eye gaze to print. Dr. Apel’s newest project melds these two lines of research by examining both eye gaze and MOR learning during storybook reading tasks in young children.

The project, the result of a $12,000 Council on Research and Creativity planning grant, will include kindergarten children from middle and low socio-economic -status homes, because Dr. Apel’s previous research found differences in MOR learning between these two groups. The hope is that the results of the study will lead to future external funding and, ultimately, to more precise and early identification of children at risk for literacy learning — and earlier and more effective intervention.