TY  - GEN
A1  - Frömer, Romy
A1  - Dimigen, Olaf
A1  - Niefind, Florian
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
A1  - Sommer, Werner
T1  - Are individual differences in reading speed related to extrafoveal visual acuity and crowding?
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - Readers differ considerably in their speed of self-paced reading. One factor known to influence fixation durations in reading is the preprocessing of words in parafoveal vision. Here we investigated whether individual differences in reading speed or the amount of information extracted from upcoming words (the preview benefit) can be explained by basic differences in extrafoveal vision-i.e., the ability to recognize peripheral letters with or without the presence of flanking letters. Forty participants were given an adaptive test to determine their eccentricity thresholds for the identification of letters presented either in isolation (extrafoveal acuity) or flanked by other letters (crowded letter recognition). In a separate eye-tracking experiment, the same participants read lists of words from left to right, while the preview of the upcoming words was manipulated with the gaze-contingent moving window technique. Relationships between dependent measures were analyzed on the observational level and with linear mixed models. We obtained highly reliable estimates both for extrafoveal letter identification (acuity and crowding) and measures of reading speed (overall reading speed, size of preview benefit). Reading speed was higher in participants with larger uncrowded windows. However, the strength of this relationship was moderate and it was only observed if other sources of variance in reading speed (e.g., the occurrence of regressive saccades) were eliminated. Moreover, the size of the preview benefit-an important factor in normal reading-was larger in participants with better extrafoveal acuity. Together, these results indicate a significant albeit moderate contribution of extrafoveal vision to individual differences in reading speed.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 494 
KW  - eye-movement control
KW  - object recognition
KW  - perceptual span
KW  - preview benefit
KW  - syntactic ambiguity
KW  - attention
KW  - fixation
KW  - readers
KW  - repetition
KW  - resolution
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-408003
SN  - 1866-8364
IS  - 494
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Risse, Sarah
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
T1  - Adult age differences in the perceptual span during reading
N2  - Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N+2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N+2 or word N+2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N+1 was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N+2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N+2 preview both for young and for old adults with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N+1. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 241 
KW  - age differences
KW  - perceptual span
KW  - N+2-boundary paradigm
KW  - preview benefit
KW  - parafoveal-on-foveal effect
KW  - compensation strategies
Y1  - 2011
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-56935
ER  -