Naming fluency in dyslexic and nondyslexic readers: Differential effects of visual crowding in foveal, parafoveal, and peripheral vision
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Reading fluency is often indexed by performance on rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks, which are
known to reflect speed of access to lexical codes. We used eye tracking to investigate visual influences on
naming fluency. Specifically, we examined how visual crowding affects fluency in a RAN-letters task on
an item-by-item basis, by systematically manipulating the interletter spacing of items, such that upcoming
letters in the array were viewed in the fovea, parafovea, or periphery relative to a given fixated letter.
All lexical information was kept constant. Nondyslexic readers’ gaze durations were longer in foveal
than in parafoveal and peripheral trials, indicating that visual crowding slows processing even for
fluent readers. Dyslexics’ gaze durations were longer in foveal and parafoveal trials than in peripheral
trials. Our results suggest that for dyslexic readers, influences of crowding on naming speed extend
to a broader visual span (to parafoveal vision) than that for nondyslexic readers, but do not extend as
far as peripheral vision. The findings extend previous research by elucidating the different visual
spans within which crowding operates for dyslexic and nondyslexic readers in an online fluency task.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 2085–2091 |
Journal | Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology |
Volume | 66 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 25 Oct 2013 |