Reading speed in normal peripheral vision is slow but can be increased through training on a letter-recognition task. The aim of the present study is to investigate the sensory and cognitive factors responsible for this improvement. The visual span is hypothesized to be a sensory bottleneck limiting reading speed. Three sensory factors-letter acuity, crowding, and mislocations (errors in the sp...

Purpose Glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness worldwide, characterized by progressive loss of retinal ganglion cells. Patients with bilateral glaucoma read slower than normal cohorts. Here we examined the factors that may underlie slow reading in glaucoma and determined the best predictor of reading speed in glaucoma. Methods A total of 38 subjects participated in this study: 17 patients w...

Despite the well-established involvement of both sensory ("bottom-up") and cognitive ("top-down") processes in literacy, the extent to which auditory or cognitive (memory or attention) learning transfers to phonological and reading skills remains unclear. Most research has demonstrated learning of the trained task or even learning transfer to a closely related task. However, few studies have re...

Verbal working memory is recognized as a strong predictor of L2 reading development in the area of learning new vocabulary, reading comprehension, and overall L2 proficiency in alphabetic languages such as English. However, few studies have addressed if the same is true in logographic languages such as Japanese. Previous literature has indicated that phonology plays a weaker role in reading Jap...

We introduce and empirically evaluate the strategy affordance hypothesis, which holds that individual differences in strategy use will mediate the relationship between performances on a working memory (WM) span task and another cognitive task only when the same strategies are afforded by both tasks. One hundred forty-eight participants completed basic memory tasks and verbal span tasks that aff...

The visual attention (VA) span deficit hypothesis of dyslexia posits that letter string deficits are a consequence of impaired visual processing. Alternatively, some have interpreted this deficit as resulting from a visual-to-phonology code mapping impairment. This study aims to disambiguate between the two interpretations by investigating performance in a non-verbal character string visual cat...

The aim of the study was to explore if a long reverberation has the same effect on recall of spoken words as background noise was shown to have in a previous study. A further aim was to study the role of working memory capacity for performance in these conditions. Thirty-two subjects performed a word recall and a sentence recognition test. They repeated each word to ensure correct identificatio...

While previous research has shown that working memory capacity (WMC) predicts sentence processing ability, the understanding of the relationship is limited as almost all studies have used the reading span task as their sole measure of WMC. The current study examined how the effects of garden-path sentences and filler-gap dependencies (as indexed by the P600) related to four measures of working ...

It has recently been suggested that speakers vary in the amount of speech planning and that the scope of planning is influenced by taskand speaker specific constraints. To test this, an experiment is presented examining the effects of linguistic structure and working memory on speech planning, as evidenced in pause duration and F0 peaks. Twenty speakers of German performed two tasks. In the fir...