Text Display Effects on the Fluency of Young Readers

The aim of this research was to investigate one of the features of text display in books printed for young readers. The feature chosen as the focus for this study was the position of the line-break with respect to the phrase structure of the sentence. When reading aloud, children tend to equate line length with a complete sentence, thus disrupting their fluency and, possibly, comprehension. This research was specifically designed to investigate the effect of a line-break after each word in the sentence pattern: subject-verb-object-adverbial. In an associated experiment, positioning effects of the word were investigated in coordinating positions between clauses, phrases and words occurring at the end of one line or at the beginning of the next. These experimental line-breaks were embedded in a story which had an identical parallel form in which none of the sentences was violated by line-breaks. In total, 254 five- to eight-year-old children were tape-recorded reading pairs of texts aloud, with a three-week break between recordings. These tapes were analysed for disruptions of fluency and comprehension. A hierarchy of difficulty in relation to the occurrence of the line-breaks for these sentence patterns has been identified.