Assessing the importance of letter pairs in initial, exterior, and interior positions in reading.

Jordan, Timothy R.; Thomas, Sharon M.; Patching, Geoffrey R.; Scott-Brown, Kenneth C.

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.29.5.883

Cited by 66 publications

(114 citation statements)

References 111 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Most clearly, interword spaces provide important information about the boundaries of words when reading (e.g., McConkie & Rayner, 1975, 1976Morris et al, 1990;Rayner et al, 1998), and these boundaries affect the perception of global aspects of words, such as their spatial location and length. However, interword spaces can also facilitate word identification due to a reduction in lateral masking (e.g., Rayner et al, 1998), especially for the exterior letters of words, which may be particularly influential for reading (e.g., Jordan, 1995;Jordan, Thomas, Patching, & Scott-Brown, 2003;Rayner, White, Johnson, & Liversedge, 2006). Consequently, following the findings of the present research, information about the locations, lengths, and identities of words to the left of fixation may be acquired during each fixational pause.…”

mentioning

confidence: 88%

What’s left? An eye movement study of the influence of interword spaces to the left of fixation during reading

2013

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In English and other alphabetic systems read from left to right, the useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend 14-15 character spaces to the right of each fixation, but only 3-4 character spaces to the left, and certainly no farther than the beginning of the fixated word. However, this leftward extent is remarkably small and seems inconsistent with the general bilateral symmetry of vision. Accordingly, in the present study we investigated the influence of a fundamental component of text to the left of fixation-interword spaces -using a well-established eyetracking paradigm in which invisible boundaries were set up along individual sentence displays that were then read. Each boundary corresponded to the leftmost edge of a word in a sentence, so that as the eyes crossed a boundary, interword spaces in the text to the left of that word were obscured (by inserting a letter x). The proximity of the obscured text during each fixational pause was maintained at one, two, three, or four interword spaces from the left boundary of each fixated word. Normal fixations, regressions, and progressive saccades were disrupted when the obscured text was up to three interword spaces (an average of over 12 character spaces) away from the fixated word, while four interword spaces away produced no disruption. These findings suggest that influential information from text is acquired during each fixational pause from much farther leftward than is generally realized and that this information contributes to normal reading performance. Implications of these findings for reading are discussed.Keywords Reading . Perceptual span . Interword spaces . Eye movements Normal reading relies on making saccadic eye movements along lines of text and ending each movement with a brief fixational pause, during which visual information is acquired. In this way, eye movements and fixational pauses provide visual information from a range of different areas on each line, and this contributes to the processing of text during reading (for a review, see Rayner, 2009).However, the extent of the area at each fixational pause within which information influences reading (the perceptual span) appears to be quite limited. In particular, estimates of the perceptual span have been reported using an eyetracking technique in which a fixed area of text extending outward from each point of fixation is displayed normally during reading, but text outside this area is replaced (e.g., with xs). Using this technique, several studies have demonstrated that skilled readers of English, and of other alphabetic systems read from left to right, obtain useful information from an asymmetric area that extends 14-15 character spaces to the right of fixation, but no more than 3-4 character spaces to the left, and certainly no farther than the beginning of the fixated word (e.g.,

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 88%

What’s left? An eye movement study of the influence of interword spaces to the left of fixation during reading

2013

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In addition, the size of the transposed letter effect has been found to be greater when the manipulated letters are internal (29 ms) than when they are external (9 ms; Perea & Lupker, 2003a, 2003b. Similarly, evidence from silent sentence reading has shown that the cost associated with reading directly fixated transposed letter strings decreased for internal letter manipulations compared with those involving initial or final letters (Rayner et al, 2006); specifically, the greatest cost to reading times occurred in those sentences where initial letters were transposed in comparison to internal letters (Johnson, 2007;Johnson & Dunne, 2012;Johnson & Eisler, 2012;White et al, 2008; see also Briihl & Inhoff, 1995;Jordan, Thomas, Patching, & Scott-Brown, 2003;Plummer & Rayner, 2012;Rayner et al, 1980;Tiffin-Richards & Schroeder, 2015). Finally, Johnson et al (2007) used the boundary paradigm to manipulate the parafoveal preview of internal versus final letters (Experiment 2) and initial versus final letters (Experiment 3).…”

Section: Internal Versus External Letter Transpositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parafoveal preprocessing of word initial trigrams during reading in adults and children.

Pagán

Blythe

Liversedge

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007;White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the preprocessing of letter identity and position information of a parafoveal word's initial trigram by adults and children using the boundary paradigm during normal sentence reading. Seven previews were generated: Identity (captain); transposed letter and substituted letter nonwords in Positions 1 and 2 (acptain-imptain); 1 and 3 (pactain-gartain), and 2 and 3 (cpatain-cgotain). Results showed a transposed letter effect (TLE) in Position 13 for gaze duration in the pretarget word; and TLE in Positions 12 and 23 but not in Position 13 in the target word for both adults and children. These findings suggest that children, similar to adults, extract letter identity and position information flexibly using a spatial coding mechanism; supporting isolated word recognition models such as SOLAR (Davis, 1999(Davis, , 2010 and SERIOL (Whitney, 2001) models.Keywords: letter position encoding, parafoveal preview, eye movements, childrenThe purpose of this study was to examine how letter identity and position information are encoded during lexical identification in sentence reading by children and adults. Specifically, in this study, parafoveal preprocessing of letter identity and position information in a word's initial trigram by children and adults during silent sentence reading was explored. Parafoveal Preprocessing in Children and AdultsResearch in parafoveal preprocessing in adults, using gazecontingent change paradigms (McConkie & Rayner, 1975;Rayner, 1975), has shown that readers not only process the fixated word but also extract some visual and linguistic information from the next word in the sentence, before it is directly fixated (see Schotter, Angele, & Rayner, 2012 for a review). Studies using the moving window paradigm have shown that in skilled readers, the effective visual field in reading (the perceptual span) extends over an asymmetrical area from 3-4 characters spaces to the left of the fixated word to 14 -15 character spaces to the right of fixation in alphabetic languages (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). Word identification occurs in the area closest to fixation (between 3 and 4 letters to the left and 6 or 7 letters to the right of fixation; Rayner & Bertera, 1979;Rayner, Inhoff, Morrison, Slowiaczek, & Bertera, 1981).With respect to the size of the effective visual field in reading for children, studies have shown that the perceptual span increases with age. Thus, 7-to 9-year-old children were found to have a perceptual span of 3 to 4 letter spaces to the left of fixation and 11 letters to the right; while the span was 3 to 4 letters spaces to the left and 14 letters to the right of fixation in 11-year-old children (Häikiö, Bertram, Hyönä & Niemi, 2009;Rayner, 1986;Sperlich, Sch...

show abstract

“…Consequently, changes in visual sensitivity as adults reach older age may not affect the targeting of fixations during reading because effective eye guidance requires only relatively coarse-scale visual cues to the location and length of words (e.g., Jordan, 1990Jordan, , 1995Jordan, Thomas, Patching, & Scott-Brown, 2003;Pollatsek & Rayner, 1982). This process may also be helped by the nature of reading, which is a highly practiced visual task involving sequences of relatively short saccades to predictable targets in a familiar and consistent spatial format.…”

Section: 2009)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Aging and the control of binocular fixations during reading.

Paterson¹,

McGowan

Jordan

2013

Psychology and Aging

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Older adults (65+ years) often have greater difficulty in reading than young adults (18-30 years). However, the extent to which this difficulty is attributable to impaired eye-movement control is uncertain. To address this issue, the alignment and location of the two eyes' fixations during reading were monitored for young and older adults. Older adults showed typical patterns of reading difficulty but the results revealed no age differences in the alignment or location of the two eyes' fixations. Thus, the difficulty older adults experience in reading is not related to oculomotor control, which appears to be preserved into older age.Key Words: Aging; Eye Movements; Reading Aging and Coordination of Binocular Fixations 3 When reading, the eyes move along each line of text in a sequence of saccadic movements separated by brief fixational pauses during which visual information is acquired from the page. Throughout each saccade, the two eyes move in the same direction and with roughly the same speed, although small differences in velocity can cause brief periods of disconjugacy (e.g., Collewijn, Erkelens, & Steinman, 1988a, 1988bFioravanti, Inchingolo, Pensiero, & Spanio, 1995), during which the rotation of the eyes, and therefore the direction of each eye's gaze, differs. It nevertheless has long been assumed that after each saccade, the resulting fixations of each eye are closely aligned so that efficient reading can take place.However, recent research shows that the locations fixated by the two eyes often differ substantially during each fixational pause (e.g., Kliegl, Nuthmann, & Engbert, 2006;Paterson, Jordan, & Kurtev, 2009; see also Kirkby, Webster, Blythe, & Liversedge, 2008). In particular, the two eyes typically fail to fixate the same character within a word on about 50% of fixational pauses, and misaligned fixations can be as much as two or more characters apart and may even be on different words.Moreover, misaligned fixations can be either crossed (when the right eye fixates to the left of the left eye's fixation), or uncrossed (when the right eye fixates to the right of the left eye's fixation), and the nature and extent of disparity may vary across fixational pauses.Fixation disparity is likely to be an important component of reading difficulty (e.g., Blythe, Liversedge, Joseph, White, Findlay, & Rayner, 2006;Kirkby, Blythe, Drieghe, & Liversedge, 2011) and appears to change as children mature into young adulthood (e.g., Fioravanti et al., 1995;Yang & Kapoula, 2003). For instance, the fixations of beginning readers (under 10 years of age) and child readers with developmental dyslexia are more likely to be misaligned, and to have greater disparity, than those of young (non-dyslexic) adult readers (e.g., Blythe et al., 2006;Kirkby et al., 2011). But major changes in the visual system continue into later adulthood through normal aging (e.g., Kerber, Ishiyama, & Baloh, 2005; Aging and Coordination of Binocular Fixations 4 for a review, see Owsley, 2011), and these changes appear to include a ...

show abstract

Assessing the importance of letter pairs in initial, exterior, and interior positions in reading.

Cited by 66 publications

References 111 publications

What’s left? An eye movement study of the influence of interword spaces to the left of fixation during reading

What’s left? An eye movement study of the influence of interword spaces to the left of fixation during reading

Parafoveal preprocessing of word initial trigrams during reading in adults and children.

Aging and the control of binocular fixations during reading.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About