There is no obvious boundary information in Chinese reading. It has been shown that the introduction of word boundary information presented with alternating colors without changing the text distribution could significantly improve the reading speed of Chinese children in grade 2 (Perea and Wang in Mem Cognit 45(7):1160-1170, 2017.…

Previous work has ostensibly shown that readers rapidly adapt to less predictable ambiguity resolutions after repeated exposure to unbalanced statistical input (e.g., a high number of reduced relative-clause garden-path sentences), and that these readers grow to disfavor the a priori more frequent (e.g. main verb) resolution after exposure (Fine,…

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating…

The increase of graphic novels in libraries and schools and on award lists illustrates one way that children's literature is changing. This article explores the relation between words and illustrations in a popular graphic novel. The multimodal format of graphic novels requires readers to consider the words, graphics, panel sizes, and uses of…

We examined the contribution of rapid automatized naming (RAN) components (articulation time, pause time, and pause time consistency) to reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling in a sample of 257 German children (139 boys, 118 girls; M[subscript age] = 5.60 years, SD = 0.31) followed from kindergarten to Grade 1. In kindergarten,…

Background: Zorzi et al. (2012, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 109, 11455) found evidence that extra-large letter spacing aids children with dyslexia, but the evidence for the coloured overlays is contradictory (e.g., Henderson et al., 2013, "J. Res. Special Educ. Needs," 13, 57; Wilkins, 2002, "Ophthalmic Physiol. Opt.," 22,…

Colored filters are used to treat Irlen syndrome (IS), a controversial disorder posited to be the cause of a substantial proportion of reading difficulties. Previously, we found that Irlen colored filters do not produce any short-term alleviation of reading difficulties in schoolchildren aged 7-12. Here, we tested whether colored filters show…

Previous studies of visually symptomatic dyslexics have found that their contrast thresholds for pattern discrimination are the same as non-dyslexics. However, when noise is added to the stimuli, contrast thresholds rise markedly in dyslexics compared with non-dyslexics. This result could be due to impaired noise exclusion in dyslexics. Some…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), together with controls matched for age and ability participated in three experiments that assessed the therapeutic benefit of colored overlays. The findings from the first experiment showed that a significantly greater proportion of children with ASD, than controls, increased reading speed when using…

We measured the increase in reading speed afforded by two currently available systems of coloured overlays: the "Intuitive Overlays," which provide a choice of 30 colours, and the "Eye Level Reading Rulers," which provide a choice of 5. Forty-eight pupils from a local authority primary school who reported experiencing symptoms of visual stress…