Flexibility in the perceptual span during reading: evidence from Mongolian

Su, J, Yin, G, Bai, X, Yan, G, Kurtev, S, Warrington, KL ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3206-8002, McGowan, VA, Liversedge, SP and Paterson, KB, 2020. Flexibility in the perceptual span during reading: evidence from Mongolian. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82 (4), pp. 1566-1572. ISSN 1943-3921

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Abstract

Readers can acquire useful information from only a narrow region of text around each fixation (the perceptual span), which extends asymmetrically in the direction of reading. Studies with bilingual readers have additionally shown that this asymmetry reverses with changes in horizontal reading direction. However, little is known about the perceptual span's flexibility following orthogonal (vertical vs. horizontal) changes in reading direction, because of the scarcity of vertical writing systems and because changes in reading direction often are confounded with text orientation. Accordingly, we assessed effects in a language (Mongolian) that avoids this confound, in which text is conventionally read vertically but can also be read horizontally. Sentences were presented normally or in a gaze-contingent paradigm in which a restricted region of text was displayed normally around each fixation and other text was degraded. The perceptual span effects on reading rates were similar in both reading directions. These findings therefore provide a unique (nonconfounded) demonstration of perceptual span flexibility.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
Creators:	Su, J., Yin, G., Bai, X., Yan, G., Kurtev, S., Warrington, K.L., McGowan, V.A., Liversedge, S.P. and Paterson, K.B.
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date:	May 2020
Volume:	82
Number:	4
ISSN:	1943-3921
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.3758/s13414-019-01960-9 DOI 1402383 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2020. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	22 Jan 2021 14:45
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:07
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42090

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