Understanding Comics. A Comparison between Children and Adults through a Coherence/Incoherence Paradigm in an Eye-tracking Study

Theories about visual narrative understanding accentuate the difference between patterns of reading comprehension in children and adults when they read text and images. This study was conducted to explore the differences in eye movement patterns when children and adults read different comic stories using a coherence/incoherence paradigm. A total of 63 participants, 31 children (10-12 years old) and 32 undergraduate university students from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, read 20 comic stories, each of them with both coherent and incoherent versions, for the two ending frames. Fixation durations, number of fixations, and number of regressions were recorded by an eye-tracker, Tobii x-120. A crossed random effects model was applied. Results showed that even though children reach a similar level of understanding than adults they spend more time and have longer fixations than adults, showing more effort to reach the whole comprehension of the stories. Besides, results do not detect significant differences between eye movements’ patterns in peak and release for the two groups studied, and therefore both components of the visual narrative grammar are considered equally relevant in the understanding of comics.