ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Human Developmental Psychology
Visual Guidance Patterns and Comprehension Mechanisms in Children's Nonlinear Picture Book Reading: An Eye-Tracking Study
Haoyu Sun
Xi Wang
Huangjia Chen
Kookmin University Graduate School, Seongbuk-gu, Republic of Korea
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract
Background: Nonlinear narrative picture books represent an emerging literacy form in children's literature, yet their cognitive processing mechanisms remain understudied. This study investigated visual guidance patterns and comprehension mechanisms in 6-7-year-old children reading nonlinear narrative picture books using eye-tracking technology. Methods: Sixty-four children (72-95 months) read two Chinese nonlinear narrative picture books while their eye movements were recorded using Tobii Pro Spectrum (1200 Hz). Four eye-tracking metrics were analyzed: fixation duration, path consistency index, cross-AOI scanning frequency, and image-first reading proportion. Comprehension was assessed through structured interviews evaluating factual understanding, inference, global coherence, and narrative structure understanding. Results: Children exhibited a predominant "image-first" pattern, with 58.6% of total fixation time on images versus 26.3% on text. However, mean fixation duration was longer for text (348.6 ms) than images (256.2 ms), indicating deeper text processing. Path consistency (r = 0.48, p < 0.001) and cross-AOI scanning (r = 0.45, p < 0.001) positively correlated with age. Eye movement measures explained an additional 26.3% variance in comprehension beyond baseline ability, with cross-AOI scanning as the strongest predictor (β = 0.45, p < 0.001). Cluster analysis identified three reader types: integrative readers achieved highest comprehension (M = 21.8), followed by text-dominant (M = 18.7) and image-dominant readers (M = 16.2). Conclusions: Findings extend text-image integration models to nonlinear contexts, supporting age-adaptive design principles and differentiated reading instruction strategies for children's picture book reading.
Summary
Keywords
Comprehension, eye tracking, Nonlinear narrative, Picture book reading, visual attention
Received
27 November 2025
Accepted
26 December 2025
Copyright
© 2025 Sun, Wang and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Huangjia Chen
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.