Skilled Deaf Readers Have an Enhanced Perceptual Span in Reading

Timothy J. Slattery · Rachel I. Mayberry · Keith Rayner

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Hearing Impairment and Communication Reading and Literacy Development Tactile and Sensory Interactions

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that, compared with hearing people, deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli viewed in the parafovea and periphery. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to preprocess upcoming words and decide where to look next. In the study reported here, we investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading by comparing the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less-skilled readers with the perceptual span of skilled hearing readers. Compared with hearing readers, the two groups of deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected given their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during complex cognitive tasks, such as reading.

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References

1998Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.2008Analyzing Linguistic Data 2009The 35th Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture: Eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search 1975The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading 1986Eye movements and the perceptual span in beginning and skilled readers 2006Do deaf individuals see better?1979Reading Without a Fovea 1981Asymmetries in the perceptual span for Israeli readers

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2014Early Visual Language Exposure and Emergent Literacy in Preschool Deaf Children: Findings From a National Longitudinal Study 2015What Eye Movements Reveal About Deaf Readers 2013Orthographic and Phonological Preview Benefits: Parafoveal Processing in Skilled and Less-Skilled Deaf Readers 2015Studying Sign Language Acquisition 2014Second-language experience modulates eye movements during first- and second-language sentence reading: Evidence from a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm.

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