Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Books designed for beginning readers typically intermix textwith illustrations in close proximity. Prior research suggeststhis standard layout may reduce literacy skills due toincreased attentional competition between text andillustrations. The current study extends this work byexamining whether manipulations to the book layout canenhance reading performance and explores whether individualdifferences in executive function and processing speed arerelated to children’s decoding and reading comprehensionwhen reading books which utilize the standard layout.Separating text and illustrations improved readingcomprehension. Preliminary results also suggest workingmemory, inhibitory control, and processing speed are relatedto reading performance.