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2007-09-10 12:17:11
By Michael KahnSun Sep 9, 7:14 PM ET
When we read our eyes lock on to different letters in the same word instead of
scanning a page smoothly from left to right as previously thought, researchers
said on Monday.
Using sophisticated eye tracking equipment, the team looked at letters within a
word and found that people combined parts of a word that were on average two
letters apart, said Simon Liversedge, a cognitive psychologist at the
University of Southampton.
The findings could lead to better methods of teaching children to read and
offer remedial treatments for those with reading disorders such as dyslexia,
said Liversedge, who presented his work at a meeting organized by the British
Association for the Advancement of Science.
"What I'm trying to understand is the relationship between the physiological
processes that underpin human written language comprehension and their
relationship with eye movements people make to read sentences," he said in a
telephone interview.
Over the past 40 years scientists have studied eye movements and reading, with
a general consensus that people look at the same letter within a word with both
eyes, Liversedge said.
To test this, Liversedge and colleagues measured the reflections of a
low-intensity infrared beam shone into a volunteer's eye when reading. This
allowed the researchers to pinpoint exactly where the eye had fixated on a
word.
Then they ran further tests to see why people did not have double vision from
picking out individual letters and found that the brain fuses the two signals
that come in from the different eyes into one clear image, Liversedge said.
"It had always been assumed that both eyes moved in perfect harmony and you
looked at a word with just one fixation," he said. "Because of this assumption
scientists looking at reading behavior have just measured one of the eyes
because they assumed the eyes were doing the same thing."
The findings also add to a wealth of information about eye movements that
scientists have built up over the years as they seek a better grasp of how we
understand written language, Liversedge said.
They also help paint an overall picture of language comprehension that can one
day benefit those with reading problems and disorders, he added.
"In order to fully understand what is going wrong in people with reading
difficulties, we first need to understand what is involved in normal language
comprehension," he said.