Crowding is a phenomenon that characterizes the normal periphery limiting letter identification when other letters surround the signal. Crowding can be eliminated by increasing the distance between the letter centres beyond a critical spacing, that is by letter spacing or by letter size increase. In reading, crowding defines an uncrowded span, the number of character positions available for correct identification, and predicts rate (Pelli and Tillmann, 2008 Nature Neuroscience 11(10) 1129-1135). We investigated the nature of the reading limitation of crowding by analyzing eye-movements patterns. Stimuli consisted of two items, varying across trials for lexicality (words or pseudowords), word length (4, 6, 8 letters) and letter spacing (experiment 1). Subjects were required to read silently or aloud in different blocks both items in free vision. The number of fixations were higher for spaced than unspaced items and increased with word length. More importantly, spacing the letters reduced the fixations durations. No qualitative differences have been found between the two reading conditions indicating that articulatory programming did not influence our outcome. Increasing size (experiment 2) produced the same fixation duration advantage, indicating that only center-to-center letter spacing matters as predicted by crowding. Overall our results indicate that crowding influences normal word reading [Supported by PRIN (Research Programmes of National Interest) 2007]
Bricolo, E., Salvi, C., Martelli, M., Arduino, L., Daini, R. (2010). Crowding affects eye-movements patterns in word reading. Intervento presentato a: 33rd European Conference on Visual Perception ECVP, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Crowding affects eye-movements patterns in word reading
BRICOLO, EMANUELA;SALVI, CAROLA;DAINI, ROBERTA
2010
Abstract
Crowding is a phenomenon that characterizes the normal periphery limiting letter identification when other letters surround the signal. Crowding can be eliminated by increasing the distance between the letter centres beyond a critical spacing, that is by letter spacing or by letter size increase. In reading, crowding defines an uncrowded span, the number of character positions available for correct identification, and predicts rate (Pelli and Tillmann, 2008 Nature Neuroscience 11(10) 1129-1135). We investigated the nature of the reading limitation of crowding by analyzing eye-movements patterns. Stimuli consisted of two items, varying across trials for lexicality (words or pseudowords), word length (4, 6, 8 letters) and letter spacing (experiment 1). Subjects were required to read silently or aloud in different blocks both items in free vision. The number of fixations were higher for spaced than unspaced items and increased with word length. More importantly, spacing the letters reduced the fixations durations. No qualitative differences have been found between the two reading conditions indicating that articulatory programming did not influence our outcome. Increasing size (experiment 2) produced the same fixation duration advantage, indicating that only center-to-center letter spacing matters as predicted by crowding. Overall our results indicate that crowding influences normal word reading [Supported by PRIN (Research Programmes of National Interest) 2007]
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