Reading vertically and horizontally mirrored text: An eye movement investigation

Abstract

This study examined the cognitive processes involved in reading vertically and horizontally mirrored text. We tracked participants’ eye movements while they were reading the Potsdam Sentence Corpus which consists of 144 sentences with target words that are manipulated for length and frequency. Sentences were presented in three different conditions: In the normal condition, text was presented with upright letters, in the vertical condition, each letter was flipped around its vertical (left-right) axis while in the horizontal condition, letters were flipped around their horizontal (up-down) axis. Results show that reading was slowed down in both mirror conditions and that horizontal mirroring was particularly disruptive. In both conditions, we found larger effects of word length than in the normal condition indicating that participants read the sentences more serially and effortfully. Similarly, frequency effects were larger in both mirror conditions in later reading measures (gaze duration, go-past time, total reading time) and particularly pronounced in the horizontal condition. This indicates that reading mirrored script involves a late checking mechanism that is particularly important for reading horizontally mirrored script. Together, our findings demonstrate that mirroring affects both early visual identification and later linguistic processes.

Flip - Reading processes when reading mirrored script

“…In line with previous research (Pittrich & Schroeder, 2022;Kolers, 1968;Kowler & Anton, 1987) our results show that horizontal mirroring is much more disruptive to reading than vertical mirroring. More importantly, our results show effects of mirror-confusability on word reading times also generalize to a more ecologically valid sentence reading task.…”

Visual similarity effects in the identification of Arabic letters: evidence with masked priming

“…As shown above, the vast majority of Arabic letters share their base letter form with at least another one, the difference being the number or position of dots (e.g., the letters ‫ﺝ‬ , ‫ﺥ‬ and ‫)ﺡ‬ readers must encode the dots (or lack thereof) accurately to encode letter identity. In this light, one might argue that letters that share their base form (e.g., ‫ﺥ‬ and ‫)ﺡ‬ may inhibit each other (i.e., lateral competition) as they compete for letter identification (see Pittrich & Schroeder, 2023, for a similar view regarding mirror letters like b and d). This scenario would suggest that, for Arabic readers, letters like ‫ﺥ‬ and ‫ﺡ‬ must be distinguished as separate letters very early in processing, reducing the potential effects of visual letter similarity in masked priming experiments.…”