Previous research has revealed conflicting results with regard to the role of the magnocellular visual system in reading and dyslexia. In order to investigate this further, the present study examined the relationship between performance on two magnocellular tasks (temporal gap detection and coherent motion), reading rate (oral and silent), and…

Three ERP experiments examined the effect of word presentation rate (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA) on the time course of word frequency and predictability effects in sentence reading. In Experiments 1 and 2, sentences were presented word-by-word in the screen center at an SOA of 700 and 490ms, respectively. While these rates are typical…

Current models of normal reading behavior emphasize not only the recognition and processing of the word being fixated (n) but also processing of the upcoming parafoveal word (n + 1). Gaze contingent displays employing the boundary paradigm often mask words in order to understand how much and what type of processing is completed on the parafoveal…

This study highlights the complex reading processes of two primary grade struggling readers. It provides a more complete picture of the readers' use of all parts of a text, verbal and visual, to construct meaning during reading. The oral reading data show that students used various linguistic strategies to read words, and the eye-tracking data…

This study investigated the relative extent to which developing readers (6- and 9-year-olds) of English (deep) or Greek (transparent) orthography exhibit serial and exterior letter effects in letter position encoding. Participants were given a visual search task that required detection of a pre-specified target letter within a random five-letter…

Reports a series of studies that investigated the role of parafoveal vision in reading by using the Stroop phenomenon. Supports the "peripheral search guidance" process of Hochberg's model of reading, and provides evidence of processing variations across retinal location. (RL)

The authors examined word skipping in reading in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, skipping rates were higher for a preview of a predictable word than for a visually similar nonword, indicating there is full recognition in parafoveal vision. In Experiment 2, foveal load was manipulated by varying the frequency of the word preceding either a 3-letter…

Results from studies of language identification in noise and of word identification from tachistoscopic presentation clearly indicate that contextual information can be used to facilitate word identification under inadequate stimulus conditions. But these results do not provide strong evidence that such an interaction is occurring during normal…

Tests the point of convergence of linguistic information from auditory and visual channels. Compares reaction times for auditory and visual stimuli consisting of sentences, syntactic nonsense strings, random words, and nonwords. Finds that listening and reading processing converge at the word level and that words processed aurally and visually…

The acquisition of visual information, which occurs during eye fixations, involves two processes: registration (visual information becoming available to the brain) and utilization (visual information being used to further text comprehension). Registration occurs at the beginning of a fixation, while at least four possible patterns describe the…

This experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that subjects must know the length of the viewing matter they will be scanning before the target is presented in order to scan efficiently. Adult subjects were required to scan visually for a predetermined item. Targets were one, two, or four letters in length and the pairs of slides shown on…

The functions of spaces between words in adult reading of text were investigated in three experiments. Results were consistent with a two-process theory in which filling parafoveal spaces disrupts guidance of the next eye movement and filling foveal spaces disrupts processing of the fixated word as well. (Author/RD)

Two stimuli of either small or capital letters were presented successively by tachistoscopic projectors. College students serving as subjects were requested to respond "yes" if the first stimulus (only one letter) was physically identical to or the same name of one of the letters in the second stimulus. The display size of the second stimulus was…