Reading Direction and the Central Perceptual Span in Urdu and English

Kevin B. Paterson · Victoria A. McGowan · Sarah J. White · Sameen Malik · Lily Abedipour · Timothy R. Jordan

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Reading and Literacy Development Visual perception and processing mechanisms Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Normal reading relies on the reader making a series of saccadic eye movements along lines of text, separated by brief fixational pauses during which visual information is acquired from a region of text. In English and other alphabetic languages read from left to right, the region from which useful information is acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend further to the right of each fixation than to the left. However, the asymmetry of the perceptual span for alphabetic languages read in the opposite direction (i.e., from right to left) has received much less attention. Accordingly, in order to more fully investigate the asymmetry in the perceptual span for these languages, the present research assessed the influence of reading direction on the perceptual span for bilingual readers of Urdu and English. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Text in Urdu and English was presented either entirely as normal or in a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm in which a region of text was displayed as normal at the reader's point of fixation and text outside this region was obscured. The windows of normal text extended symmetrically 0.5° of visual angle to the left and right of fixation, or asymmetrically by increasing the size of each window to 1.5° or 2.5° to either the left or right of fixation. When participants read English, performance for the window conditions was superior when windows extended to the right. However, when reading Urdu, performance was superior when windows extended to the left, and was essentially the reverse of that observed for English. CONCLUSION: These findings provide a novel indication that the perceptual span is modified by the language being read to produce an asymmetry in the direction of reading and show for the first time that such an asymmetry occurs for reading Urdu.

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References

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2014Second-language experience modulates eye movements during first- and second-language sentence reading: Evidence from a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm.2018Perceptual span, visual span, and visual attention span: Three potential ways to quantify limits on visual processing during reading 2016Cross-Language Modulation of Visual Attention Span: An Arabic-French-Spanish Comparison in Skilled Adult Readers 2019How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate

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