Keith Rayner

The Perceptual Span and Peripheral Cues in Reading

Jane Ashby

Alexander Pollatsek

Charles Clifton Jr.

Reading is a highly complex skill that is prerequisite to success in many societies in which a great deal of information is communicated in written form. Since the 1970s, much has been learned about the reading process from research by cognitive psychologists. This book summarizes that important work and puts it into a coherent framework. The book’s central theme is how readers go about extracting information from the printed page and comprehending the text. Like its predecessor, this thoroughly updated 2nd Edition encompasses all aspects of the psychology of reading with chapters on writing systems, word recognition, the work of the eyes during reading, inner speech, sentence processing, discourse processing, learning to read, dyslexia, individual differences and speed reading. Psychology of Reading, 2nd Edition, is essential reading for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in cognitive psychology and could be used as a core textbook on courses on the psychology of reading and related topics. In addition, the clear writing style makes the book accessible to people without a background in psychology but who have a personal or professional interest in the process of reading.

2nd Edition

Psychology of Reading

Eye Movements in Reading: Perceptual and Language Processes focuses on eye movement and cognitive processes as a way to study the reading process. This book also discusses the different aspects of reading. Organized into seven parts encompassing 26 chapters, this book begins with a discussion on the perceptual and psychophysical factors essential to eye movement during reading. This book then explains how some psychophysical factors, such as type size and masking, affect the reading performance. Other chapters consider the role of transient and sustained cells, as well as their possible effects on reading. This text also examines the size of the perceptual span in reading and the integration of information across eye movement. Finally, this book explains the eye movement abnormalities, general eye movement parameters, and the cognitive processes within the reading disabled group. This book is a valuable resource to optometrists, scientists, field researchers, and readers who are interested in the reading process.

Perceptual and Language Processes

Eye Movements in Reading

David A. Balota

G.B. Flores d'Arcais

Comprehension Processes in Reading addresses the interrelationship among several areas relevant to understanding how people comprehend text. The contributors focus on the on-line processes associated with text understanding rather than simply with the product of that comprehension -- what people remember from reading. Presenting the latest theories and research findings from a distinguished group of contributors, Comprehension Processes in Reading is divided into four major sections. Each section, concluding with a commentary chapter, discusses a different aspect of reader understanding or dysfunction such as individual word comprehension, sentence parsing, text comprehension, and comprehension failures and dyslexia .

Comprehension Processes in Reading

Alan Kennedy

Ralph Radach

Measurement and analysis of eye movements are two of the most powerful ways to study the workings of the human mind. This Special Issue on eye movements and information processing in reading presents an overview of experimental research based on this methodology. Eye movements provide a unique opportunity to examine principles of human information processing in a well-structured visual environment while people engage in a natural cognitive task. At the same time, oculomotor measures can be used as a tool to develop and test psycholinguistic hypotheses about the processing of written language. The papers in this issue contribute to both aspects, addressing issues that dominate current debates in the field. Seen from the angle of visual information processing, a major theme is the role played by parafoveal information for different types and levels of processing and for oculomotor control in reading. This includes effects of visual and linguistic word properties on the selection of words for fixation and the specification of saccade amplitudes. Clearly the most controversial question in this context concerns the allocation of attention, with positions ranging from a sequentially moving spotlight to a gradient of spatially distributed processing. Related to this is the issue of serial vs. parallel word processing and the fundamental question as to what extent the duration of fixations in reading is related to lexical processing. Taking a psycholinguistic perspective, the topics addressed include several levels of language processing from orthography to pragmatic information in sentence reading. New approaches to the study of morphologically complex words are reported, together with novel work revealing the complex nature of the apparently accessible, but elusive, concept of word frequency. Other papers reflect current theoretical discussions centered on the development of computational models of the reading process and contribute to the empirical base of these discussions. Taken together, this collection of papers, supplemented by an introduction to the field and a commentary on major issues, presents a comprehensive and up-to-date perspective on a research area currently characterised by numerous theoretical and empirical disputes. The papers will be of particular appeal to readers interested in basic and applied psycholinguistics, attention and visual perception, motor control and the modelling of complex cognitive processes.

Eye Movements and Information Processing During Reading

The last 20 years have witnessed a revolution in reading research. Cognitive psychologists, using high-speed computers to aid in the collection and analysis of data, have developed tools that have begun to answer questions that were previously thought unanswerable. These tools allow for a "chronometric," or moment-to-moment, analysis of the reading process. Foremost among them is the use of the record of eye movements to help reveal the underlying perceptual and cognitive processes of reading. This volume provides a coherent framework for the research accomplished on the reading process over the past 15 years. It emphasizes how readers go about extracting information from the printed page and how they comprehend the text.

Keith Rayner

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