Learning to read in German : eye movements and the perceptual span of German beginning readers and their relation to reading motivation In the present dissertation the development of eye movement behavior and the perceptual span of German beginning readers was investigated in Grades 1 to 3 (Study 1) and longitudinally within a one year time interval (Study 2) as well as in relation to intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation (Study 3). The presented results are intended to ﬁll the gap of only sparse information on young readers’ eye movements and completely missing information on German young readers’ perceptual span and its development. On the other hand reading motivation data have been scrutinized with respect to reciprocal effects on reading comprehension but not with respect to more immediate basic cognitive processing (e.g. word decoding) that is indicated by different eye movement measures. Based on a longitudinal study design children in Grades 1–3 participated in a moving window reading experiment with eye movement recordings in two successive years. All children were participants of a larger longitudinal study on intrapersonal developmental risk ...