PURPOSE Visual-span profiles are plots of letter-recognition accuracy as a function of letter position left and right of the point of fixation. Legge, Mansfield, and Chung [Legge, G. E., Mansfield, J. S., & Chung, S. T. L. (2001). Psychophysics of reading-XX. Linking letter recognition to reading speed in central and peripheral vision. Vision Research, 41(6), 725-743] proposed that reduced size...

OBJECTIVE The present study sought to document the word reading and comprehension levels attained by children who were implanted by 5 yr of age. It was hypothesized that the improved speech perception abilities acquired with cochlear implantation would promote phonological coding skills and facilitate the acquisition of beginning reading skills. DESIGN Three subtests from diagnostic reading a...

According to attentional control theory, high trait anxious individuals experience reduced attentional control as compared to low trait anxious individuals due to the imbalance between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional systems. One consequence is that high trait anxious individuals have difficulty resisting distraction, as compared to low trait anxious individuals. A separate line o...

The goal of this exploratory study is to investigate the effect of working memory capacity on L2 oral fluency in 79 learners of English as a foreign language. Three tasks were used as measures of working memory (the reading span task, letter span task and an attention-switching task). Twelve measures of fluency were used spanning across speed, breakdown and repair fluency. Positive correlations...

This study investigates the relationship among working memory (WM), first language (L1), second language (L2), and mathematics; with an aim to understand whether achievement in mathematics and L1 is related to performance in later L2 learning; and if so, whether WM components (i.e. phonological loop and central executive) play a role in this relationship between mathematics and language. A seco...

Despite the traditional view that damage to the hippocampus and/or surrounding areas of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) does not impair short-term or working memory (WM), recent research has shown MTL amnesics to be impaired on WM tasks that require maintaining a small amount of information over brief retention intervals (e.g., maintenance of a single face for one second). However, the types of ...

According to the visual span control hypothesis, eye movements are controlled in relation to the size of visual span. In reading, the decrease of contrast reduces visual span, saccade sizes, and reading speed. The purpose of the present study is to determine how stimulus contrast affects the speed of two-dimensional visual search and how changes in eye movements and visual span could explain ch...

While some first language (L1) reading models suggest that inefficient word recognition and small working memory tend to inhibit higher-level comprehension processes; the Compensatory Encoding Model maintains that slow word recognition and small working memory do not normally hinder reading comprehension, as readers are able to operate metacognitive strategies to compensate for inefficient word...

Our goal is to link spatial and temporal properties of letter recognition to reading speed for text viewed centrally or in peripheral vision. We propose that the size of the visual span the number of letters recognizable in a glance imposes a fundamental limit on reading speed. and that shrinkage of the visual span in peripheral vision accounts for slower peripheral reading. In Experiment 1, we...