How reading braille is both like and unlike reading print

The letter detection errors of blind readers of braille were compared with those of sighted readers of print in order to determine whether braille can be read in units larger than the individual braille character. Sighted readers missed a disproportionate number ofhs in the wordhe whether the prose was intact or scrambled, supporting Healy’s (1976) conclusion that high-frequency words are read in units larger than the individual letter. By contrast, blind readers missed only a disproportionate number ofhs inhe when reading prose, suggesting that their detection failures were based on redundancy rather than unitization. Although the unit of perception for braille appears to differ from that for print, the factors underlying braille comprehension ability do not. Braille comprehension was correlated with listening comprehension and working memory capacity, a finding consistent with the visual reading literature which has shown that it is the higher level linguistic processes that tax working memory capacity and not the lower level visual word encoding processes that chiefly underlie individual differences in comprehending print.