Reading begins in the retina, whose structure imposes severe constraints on visual word recognition. Only the central part of the retina, the fovea, has sufficient resolution for visual identification of small letters. This is why our gaze constantly shifts during reading. Classic experiments by Rayner and colleagues (Rayner, 1998) have determined the amount of information acquired during gaze fixation. By masking letters at a certain distance from the fovea, they showed that preservation of around 4 letters to the left and 15 to the right of the fixation point leads to normal reading speed. In reality, only the identity of around 3-4 letters to the left and 7-8 letters to the right of fixation seems to be extracted. This visual span is therefore very narrow. Overall, these results suggest that reading proceeds essentially by sequential acquisition of information during each saccade, an acquisition which takes place virtually word by word, even if some parafoveal information seems to be extracted concerning the following word. These experiments may be seen as partial justification for the concentration of psycholinguistic research on isolated word processing - even though in-depth research into sentence and text processing remains all too rare.
09:30 - 11:00
