To What Extent Do Pictures Support Malaysian Children's Comprehension of Stories?: An Eye-Tracking Experiment

Many studies have been conducted on the development of young children; however, not many have explored the cognitive processes of prereaders. The eye-tracker has been used with success to investigate the cognitive processes of young children abroad, but such studies are lacking in Malaysia. This study used an experimental procedure created with eye-tracking technology on 22 prereaders (aged 5 to 6) in a Malaysian kindergarten. The prereaders were exposed to four conditions: (1) listening to narration and viewing a congruent picture with text, (2) listening to narration and viewing an incongruent picture with text, (3) viewing a picture with text without narration, and (4) listening to narration and viewing a text. The main objective of this project is to test which content of pictures helps the students understand the narration and the text, and how they use visual attention to build a better understanding. The findings revealed that children strongly preferred pictures to texts, but when the narration was not present, they spent more time looking at the text.