A digital interface to speed up learning to read in 1st-grade and to collect finger movement related to reading skills

Learning to read is a journey full of challenge for first-graders that can be hindered by perceptual and attentional mechanisms. To alleviate some of these barriers, we tested a reading protocol inspired by the Digit-tracking method where the reading text was blurred to reduce visual clutter and attentional interference and increase multi-modal attentional focalisation through finger pointing. As the index finger moved through the blurred text, the letters just above the finger position were unblurred and visible in foveal vision. We hypothesized that this approach might facilitate orthographic decoding and promote efficient ocular-digital scanning. Fifty-four first-grade children were divided into two groups in a crossover design: half of the children did digit-tracking exercises first, followed by plain paper exercises; the reverse order was used for the other half. Results showed that improvement in letters, syllables and meaningless text-reading after digit-tracking training was higher than after paper training. Using recorded finger trajectories as a proxy for eye movements, we found that text scanning patterns (saccade length, landing position, regressive saccades) predicted children’s reading text difficulty and orthographic decoding skills. We conclude that a training that employed digit-tracking on a tablet device improves first graders’ reading performance in the short term more than the same training performed on paper and may provide a sensitive metric of reading competences, that should be confirmed by future replication studies.