Adults with dyslexia show parafoveal preview benefits during silent reading

Worf, Lucy (2015) Adults with dyslexia show parafoveal preview benefits during silent reading. Bournmouth University. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Readers with dyslexia struggle to read accurately, fluently and efficiently. Their difficulty processing written words in order to read them is often reflected in their eye movement behaviour. The current study was designed to explore parafoveal pre-processing in dyslexic readers, to determine whether dyslexic readers were able to obtain a processing benefit from information presented parafoveally prior to directly fixating it; a robust effect characteristic of skilled adult reading. Twelve skilled adult readers and twelve adults with dyslexia read sixty-four single line sentences, all of which contained a specific target word. The parafoveally presented preview of the target word was from one of four preview manipulations; identical (beach), orthographic (bench), homophone (beech) or random (jfzrp). Once a saccade was made that crossed an invisible boundary directly after the pre-target word this preview changed to the correct target word (beach). The pattern of results suggested dyslexic readers were able to pre-process information parafoveally in a similar manner to skilled readers. Skilled and dyslexic adult readers both received a significant preview benefit from the identical preview compared to all three of the alternative preview conditions. A preview benefit for dyslexic readers was not evident in first fixation duration, but was evident for skilled readers. It was concluded that the lack of preview benefit at first fixation and across the three manipulated preview conditions for dyslexic readers was a result of a global visual attention span deficit. Despite this, dyslexic readers make some use of parafoveal information to increase their reading efficiency, similar to skilled readers.