Monitoring Eye gaze and pupillometry for Reading and Language Integration in Neurodevelopment

Objective

Reading difficulties remain one of the most underestimated barriers to education and career opportunities. While dyslexia and other Specific Learning Disorders are usually identified in childhood, many adolescents and young adults continue to struggle, especially with silent reading – the most used modality in academic and professional life. Current assessment methods face major limitations: (i) they focus on performance metrics like words-per-minute or comprehension questions, without capturing the hidden cognitive load; (ii) they center on oral reading, with only artificial and non-ecological tools available for silent reading; and (iii) their sensitivity decreases with age, failing to capture compensatory strategies that mask difficulties at a high cognitive cost. MERLIN (Monitoring Eye gaze and pupillometry for Reading and Language Integration in Neurodevelopment) will develop INnerSIGHT, a non-invasive tool enabling precise, quantitative assessment of fluency and cognitive effort during aloud and silent reading. It combines lightweight head-mounted eyetrackers, a spiral booklet of validated reading passages, and a custom software to integrate gaze behavior and pupillary response with the read text. Building on the promising results of the ERC wHiSPER project on gaze and pupillometry as markers of cognitive effort in ecological tasks, MERLIN will: (i) develop the INnerSIGHT software, textual stimuli, and assessment procedures; (ii) validate its effectiveness in a large cohort of neurotypical adolescents and young adults in schools and laboratories, and in a clinical cohort of dyslexic participants in collaboration with expert clinicians; and (iii) define a feasible market strategy to maximize its impact. The resulting INnerSIGHT system will represent a holistic tool including all the desired features for a low-cost, non-invasive, precise, and ecologically valid assessment of reading fluency and cognitive effort.