Eye movement during reading in young adults with cerebral palsy measured with eye tracking

Background: Cerebral palsy is a nonprogressive brain disorder associated with lifelong motor impairments and often with cognitive deficits, impaired communication, and impaired sensory perception. Vision deficits, in particular, occur frequently in cerebral palsy and can lead to reading difficulties. Objective: Investigate the extent to which the motor impairments in this clinical group affect patients’ ability to read. Methods: An eye-tracking system was used to record the eye movements during a reading task in 31 adults diagnosed with cerebral palsy and in 10 healthy controls. Participants were asked to read out loud 1 to 5 excerpts from children’s books. Results: In comparison to the healthy readers, cerebral palsy patients took longer to read the excerpts; made more saccades, fixations, and regressions; and made shorter saccades. Average fixation times were similar between the 2 groups, but the average saccade duration was significantly longer for the cerebral palsy group, as a function of the degree of severity of motor impairment. The latter was not a determinant of the level of text comprehension achieved by these patients. Conclusions: Objective measures of eye movement during a reading task can be obtained in cerebral palsy patients using eye-tracking techniques. Results suggest that cerebral palsied patients may experience difficulties in searching for words during reading.