Following a multi-talker conversation relies on the ability to rapidly and efficiently shift the focus of spatial attention from one talker to another. The current study investigated the listening costs associated with shifts in spatial attention during conversational turn-taking in 16 normally-hearing listeners using a novel sentence recall task. Three pairs of syntactically fixed but semantic...

The visual span for reading is the number of letters that can be recognized without moving the eyes and is hypothesized to impose a sensory limitation on reading speed. Factors affecting the size of the visual span have been studied using alphabet letters. There may be common constraints applying to recognition of other scripts. The aim of this study was to extend the concept of the visual span...

The visual span refers to the number of adjacent characters that can be recognized in a single glance. It is viewed as a sensory bottleneck in reading for both normal and clinical populations. In peripheral vision, the visual span for English characters can be enlarged after training with a letter-recognition task. Here, we examined the transfer of training from Korean to English characters for...

Eye-movement experiments suggest that the perceptual span during reading is larger than the fixated word, asymmetric around the fixation position, and shrinks in size contingent on the foveal processing load. We used the SWIFT model of eye-movement control during reading to test these hypotheses and their implications under the assumption of graded parallel processing of all words inside the pe...

Two groups of deaf children, aged 8 and 14 years, were presented with a number of tasks designed to assess their reliance on phonological coding. Their performance was compared with that of hearing children of the same chronological age (CA) and reading age (RA). Performance on the first task, short-term recall of pictures, showed that the deaf children's spans were comparable to those of RA co...

Reading speed for English text is slower for text oriented vertically than horizontally. Yu, Park, Gerold, and Legge (2010) showed that slower reading of vertical text is associated with a smaller visual span (the number of letters recognized with high accuracy without moving the eyes). Three possible sensory determinants of the size of the visual span are: resolution (decreasing acuity at lett...

First generation retinal prostheses containing 50-60 electrodes are currently in clinical trials. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the theoretical upper limit (best possible) reading performance attainable with a state-of-the-art 60-channel retinal implant and to find the optimum viewing conditions for the task. Four normal volunteers performed full-page text reading tasks with a low-r...

In research on eye-movement control during reading, the importance of cognitive processes related to language comprehension relative to visuomotor aspects of saccade generation is the topic of an ongoing debate. Here we investigate various eye-movement measures during reading of randomly shuffled meaningless text as compared to normal meaningful text. To ensure processing of the material, reade...