Adolescents’ Developing Sensitivity to Orthographic and Semantic Cues During Visual Search for Words
Résumé
Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to assess the influence of words either
looking like the target word (orthographic distractors) or semantically related to the target
word (semantic distractors) on visual search for words within lists by adolescents of 11,
13, and 15 years of age. In Experiment 1 (literal search task), participants saw the target
word before the search (e.g., “raven”), whereas in Experiment 2 (categorical task) the
target word was only defined by its semantic category (e.g., “bird”). In both experiments,
participants’ search times decreased from fifth to ninth grade, both because older
adolescents gazed less often at non-target words during the search and because
they could reject non-target words more quickly once they were fixated. Progress in
visual search efficiency was associated with a large increase in word identification skills,
which were a strong determinant of average gaze durations and search times for the
categorical task, but much less for the literal task. In the literal task, the presence
of orthographic or semantic distractors in the list increased search times for all age
groups. In the categorical task, the impact of semantic distractor words was stronger
than in the literal task because participants needed to gaze at the semantic distractors
longer than at the other words before rejecting them. Altogether, the data support the
assumption that the progressive automation of word decoding up until the age of 12
and the better quality of older adolescents’ lexical representations facilitate a flexible use
of both the perceptual and semantic features of words for top-down guidance within the
displays. In particular, older adolescents were better prepared to aim at or reject words
without gazing at them directly. Finally, the overall similar progression of the maturation of
single word visual search processes and that of more real-life information search within
complex verbal documents suggests that the young adolescents’ difficulties in searching
the Web effectively could be due to their insufficiently developed lexical representations
and word decoding abilities.
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