The role of context in reading with central field loss

It has been suggested that readers with central field loss (CFL) may not be able to use context to facilitate reading in the same way that normally sighted readers do because their processing capacity is fully utilized decoding the degraded visual stimulus. If true, this could account for their slow reading, even when text is appropriately magnified. Readers with CFL and normally sighted, age-matched controls read sentences and lists of random words from two dynamic text displays. We used sentence-gain (the ratio of reading rates for sentences to random words) to assess the use of context. Sentence-gain was equivalent across groups. Therefore, reduced reliance on context cannot explain the slower reading rates of people with CFL.