Abstract:
Eye tracking has become a powerful tool from two decades that gives online measures of complex cognitive process such as reading. Kannada is alphasyllabary orthography. It is non-linear unlike English. Syllables are the primary basic unit to process. Thelanguage Kannada can be written in complex consonant clusters, which makes it orthographically dense to read. The processing of such a dense orthography show increased processing difficulty in terms of reading time, fixation count, and first pass reading time. When reading measures were observed for children with learning disability, they had more difficulty in processing than their age matched typically developed children. Kannada is a flexible word order language. umbling of words in a sentence does not make any difference in reading process. Developmental trend in reading Kannada show the Increase in reading time, fixation count, total fixation duration, progressive and regressive fixation as a function of age. Developmental stability was also observed after a certain age (13-14 years in Kannada). Perceptual span for Kannada was found to be 8 characters (one character to the left of fixation and 6 characters to the right of fixation. The perceptual span in Kannada is smaller in comparison to English which is linear in nature and larger than of Chinese which is denser in nature.

About Speaker:

Dr. Aparna Pandey is working as Assistant Professor of psychology at Kristu Jayanti College, Bengaluru. Dr. Pandey’s Ph.D is from University of Mysore (Dept of Psychology). Her research interests are cognitive psychology, linguistics, and research methodology.