Unstable ocular dominance and reading ability

An ocular anomaly, unstable ocular dominance, has been shown to be associated with poor reading performance in clinically selected subjects. A study is reported in which this anomaly was examined in a nonclinical sample. Two groups of children of similar reading performance and IQ but differing in chronological age were selected. The older children had a mean discrepancy between their reading and chronological age of 19 months. Unstable ocular dominance was more frequent in these poor readers. The hypothesis that this instability would lead to more errors and longer decision times for distinguishing left-right mirror-image figures was not supported. If unstable ocular dominance is to be established as anything other than a correlate of specific reading retardation, it is necessary to establish the processes through which it is operative. These have yet to be determined.     

Eye movements during repeated reading of a text

The facilitation of eye movements was studied in two experiments involving a repeated reading paradigm. A text was read three times. Initial reading was immediately followed by the first repetition; the second repetition took place one week later. Recall task instructions were used to encourage a detailed reading of the text. The data were analysed sentence by sentence from the 'first pass' readings not including returns to earlier test locations. A general facilitation for all eye movement parameters was found. Repetition decreased the summed fixation time, the average fixation duration, the number of progressive fixations, and the number of regressions. Additionally, repetition increased saccade lengths. Experiment 2 further qualified the general facilitory effect. The middle section of the text, being the most dense of information, was devoted the most visual attention by the readers. Moreover, it was also found to produce the largest degree of facilitation due to repetition. This was true with all other eye movement parameters except saccade length and average fixation duration. Average fixation durations were longer in the beginning of a text than in the end. This was true in all the three readings. Similarly, for each reading, highly important sentences received more visual attention than unimportant sentences.     

Eye movements and variations in reading time

Summary Passages of prose were constructed which obeyed a stylistic convention referred to as dovetailing. For a given pair of sentences the final position of the first, and the initial position of the second, had the same referent. It was shown that critical dovetailed lines of text were read more rapidly than lines containing the same information, but lacking sequential structure. Degrading text by obscuring all interword spaces removed this reading time advantage. Analysis of subjects' eye movements during reading suggested that reading facilitation, induced by dovetailing, may result, not only from higher-order structural properties of text, but also from local features (particularly word-length information and associative relationships between words) known to influence eye movements.     

Eye movements and spatial coding in reading

Summary Two experiments are reported which test the hypothesis that during reading subjects maintain in working memory a record of the spatial location of items and that this code is used to guide reinspections. In the first experiment the premisses of short syllogisms were read, one word at a time, under three presentation conditions: (a) in correct temporal order and in appropriate sequential spatial locations; (b) in correct temporal order but in random spatial locations; (c) in correct temporal order and in a single central location. A measure was taken of the time to respond to possible conclusions of the syllogisms. Solution times were longer in conditions (b) and (c) relative to (a). In the second experiment eye movements were recorded as subjects judged the soundness of auditorily presented conclusions following visual presentation of the premisses of syllogisms. Non-random eye movements took place during the solution phase directed to locations previously occupied by text in the display.     

Eye movement control during reading: II. Frequency of refixating a word

An analysis of over 40,000 eye fixations made by college students during reading indicates that the frequency of immediately refixating a word following an initial eye fixation on it varies with the location of that fixation. The refixation frequency is lowest near the center of the word, positively accelerating with distance from the center. The data are well fit by a parabolic function. Assuming that refixation frequency is related to the frequency of successful word identification, the observed curvilinear relation results naturally from models that postulate a linear decrease in visual information with retinal eccentricity. A single letter difference in fixation location in a word can make a sizeable difference in the likelihood of refixating that word. The effects of word length and cultural frequency on the frequency of refixating are also examined.     

Eye movement control in reading: evidence against semantic preprocessing.

Prior experiments reported by Underwood and his colleagues have suggested that information about the informative parts of parafoveal words that have not yet been fixated can influence where readers fixate next. The basic finding that they have reported is that the eyes move farther into a word when the information that uniquely identifies the word is at the end of the word rather than at the beginning of the word. On the basis of such results, it has been suggested that semantic preprocessing influences eye movement behavior in reading. Some theoretical and methodological problems are raised with the prior experiments and then an attempt to replicate the finding is reported. With a highly accurate eyetracking system, the basic finding could not be replicated. An alternative account of eye movement control in reading is discussed.     

Eye movements of dyslexic children when reading in a regular orthography

Participants were German dyslexic readers (13-year-olds) who-compared to English dyslexic readers-suffer mainly from slow laborious reading and less from reading errors. The eye movements of eleven dyslexic boys and age-matched controls were recorded during reading of text passages and pseudoword lists. For both text and pseudoword reading, the dyslexic readers exhibited more and much longer fixations, but relatively few regressions. Increased length of words and pseudowords led to a greater increase in number of fixations for dyslexic than normal readers. Comparisons across studies suggest that the present German dyslexic eye movement findings differ from English-based findings by a lower frequency of regressions (presumably due to the higher regularity of German) and from Italian findings by longer fixation duration (presumably due to the greater syllabic complexity of German).     

Stress assignment in reading Italian: Friendship outweighs dominance

Stress assignment to polysyllabic words is the only aspect of the pronunciation of written Italian that cannot be predicted by rule. It could be a function of stress dominance in the language or of stress neighborhood (i.e., the number of words sharing an ending and a stress pattern). In two experiments, we investigated stress assignment in Italian adult and, most importantly, young readers. Word frequency and number of stress friends influenced reading times and accuracy, outweighing any effect of stress dominance. In the presence of a majority of stress friends, the reading of low-frequency words was only affected by stress neighborhood. These effects were the same in fourth graders and adult readers. We argue that distributional information based on the number of stress friends—rather than stress dominance—is the most effective factor in assigning stress to words in reading.     

On the dominance of whole-word knowledge in reading aloud

The localist dual-route model of visual word recognition assumes a routine thataddresses the pronunciation of all words known to the reader (the lexical-semantic pathway) and another routine, operating in parallel, thatassembles pronunciations on the basis of sublexical spelling-sound correspondences. The present experiment exploits theexception effect (in which words that are atypical in terms of their spelling-sound correspondences are named more slowly than typical ones) because it is considered a marker of the joint operation of these two routines. Participants named high- and lowfrequency regular and exception words that were repeated across two blocks of trials. The widely reported interaction between regularity and word frequency is present in Block 1 but is reduced in magnitude in Block 2. DRC, an implemented dual-route model, simulates the data. Taken in conjunction with other reports, the results provide further evidence for a double dissociation between addressed and assembled routines and are consistent with the view that skill in recognizing printed words known to the reader reflects the dominance of orthographic over phonological processing.     

Eye movement contingent display control in studying reading

A computer system has been developed that permits experimental control over a CRT display contingent upon characteristics of the viewer’s eye movements. The display can be changed during specific saccadic eye movements or fixations. Uses of such a system for studying reading are described. The paper reviews hardware and software considerations in developing such a system.     

Mindless reading revisited: Eye movements during reading and scanning are different

In an extension of a study by Vitu, O’Regan, Inhoff, and Topolski (1995), we compared global and local characteristics of eye movements during (1) reading, (2) the scanning of transformed text (in which each letter was replaced with a z), and (3) visual search. Additionally, we examined eye behavior with respect to specific target words of high or low frequency. Globally, the reading condition led to shorter fixations, longer saccades, and less frequent skipping of target strings than did scanning transformed text. Locally, the manipulation of word frequency affected fixation durations on the target word during reading, but not during visual search or z-string scanning. There were also more refixations on target words in reading than in scanning. Contrary to Vitu et al.’s (1995) findings, our results show that eye movements are not guided by a global strategy and local tactics, but by immediate processing demands.