Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that, compared with hearing people, deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli viewed in the parafovea and periphery. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to preprocess upcoming words and decide where to look next. In the study reported here, we investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading by comparing the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less-skilled readers with the perceptual span of skilled hearing readers. Compared with hearing readers, the two groups of deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected given their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during complex cognitive tasks, such as reading.

Figure 1

Example of a moving window on three consecutive fixations. The asterisk represents the position of the eye. In this example, the window is asymmetrical and shows 4 character positions to the left and 10 character positions to the right of fixation.

Figure 2

Reading rate (words per minute) as a function of window size for the skilled hearing readers (SKH), skilled deaf readers (SKD) and less skilled deaf readers (LSKD).

Figure 3

Results for four eye movement measures for each group of participants as a function of window size.