Reading is a critical skill as it provides a gateway for other
learning within and outside of school. Many children struggle
to acquire this fundamental skill. Suboptimal design of books
for beginning readers may be one factor that contributes to the
difficulties children experience. Specifically, extraneous
details in illustrations (i.e., interesting but irrelevant to the story
elements) could promote attentional competition and hamper
emerging literacy skills. We used eye-tracking technology to
examine this possibility. The results of this study indicated that
excluding extraneous details from illustrations in a book for
beginning readers reduced attentional competition (indexed by
gaze shifts away from text) and improved children’s reading
comprehension. This study suggests that design of reading
materials for children learning to read can be optimized to
promote literacy development in children.