Direction-specific reading experience shapes perceptual span.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Linguistics

Background:

• The perceptual span, crucial for reading, is the spatial extent of effective information extraction during a single eye fixation.
• How direction-specific reading experience influences the perceptual span remains unclear.
• Traditional Chinese, read horizontally or vertically, offers a unique model to study this without confounding language proficiency or participant differences.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of reading direction (horizontal vs. vertical) on the perceptual span in traditional Chinese readers.
• To determine if reading experience with a specific direction affects perceptual span size.

Main Methods:

• A within-item and within-subject design was employed.
• Eye movements of traditional Chinese readers were recorded while reading horizontally and vertically presented sentences.
• A gaze-contingent moving-window technique masked text outside the reader's focus, irrespective of text direction.

Main Results:

• Asymptotic reading performance was achieved with a smaller window size for vertical reading compared to horizontal reading, indicating a smaller perceptual span for vertical text.
• The size of the vertical perceptual span increased with the readers' familiarity with vertical text.
• This suggests that reading direction and experience significantly modulate the perceptual span.

Conclusions:

• Factors beyond orthographic complexity and language proficiency influence reading.
• Direction-specific reading experiences, such as reading vertical text, can shape and adapt the perceptual span.
• The findings highlight the plasticity of the reading system in response to reading direction and practice.