The study investigates silent reading in the Russian language during th e early stages of acquiring this skill by employing th e m ethod of eye tracking. For this purpose we developed th e corpus consisting of 30 sentences w ith target words w ith controlled length and frequency. Second grade pupils (n = 37; average age is 8.6 ± 0.33 years old) participated in th e study. In addition to read ing tasks, all th e children passed neuropsychological assessment, adapted for 6-9 years olds. The

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... is of eye movements was carried out in comparison w ith a similar study conducted in the German language (Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2015) . Results show th a t during reading Russian children made more single fixations and skips th an German children. However effects of frequency and length were similar in th e b oth languages. Based on neuropsychological scores we distinguished three groups of children: (1) w ith th e weakness of visual and visual-spatial infor mation processing, (2) w ith th e weakness of kinesthetic and auditory inform ation processing and (3) w ithout these weaknesses. The comparison of eye tracking indices for th e three groups showed th a t children w ith low scores on visual and visual-spatial processing generated more and longer fixations th an the children of th e tw o other groups. The obtained data do n ot contradict the dual route models of w ord recognition, b u t require for th eir specification new researches.