Factors influencing readability of rapidly presented text segments

Embodied negation and levels of concreteness: A TMS study on German and Italian language processing

According to the embodied cognition perspective, linguistic negation may block the motor simulations induced by language processing. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the left primary motor cortex (hand area) of monolingual Italian and German healthy participants during a rapid serial visual presentation of sentences from their own language. In these languages, the negative particle is located at the beginning and at the end of the sentence, respectively. The study investigated whether the interruption of the motor simulation processes, accounted for by reduced motor evoked potentials (MEPs), takes place similarly in two languages differing on the position of the negative marker. Different levels of sentence concreteness were also manipulated to investigate if negation exerts generalized effects or if it is affected by the semantic features of the sentence. Our findings indicate that negation acts as a block on motor representations, but independently from the language and words concreteness level.

Psychology of Computer Use: XV. Effects of Display Format on Reading Text from a Crt

Comprehension of brief computer-displayed text was investigated. Question-answering ability was affected by both rate of text presentation and text difficulty. More importantly, though, text presented one word at a time was comprehended better than text presented in multiword units or chunks. Results are discussed with regard to optimizing reading from computer displays.

Reading Chinese Text in Sequential Display Format: Effects of Display Size

This study investigated comprehension of rapid, serial visual presentations of Chinese text. 10 passages in Chinese were presented as sequences of text segments, ranging from 1 to 13 characters in length, to a fixed location on a computer screen at rates of 230 and 460 characters per min. Subjects were better able to answer questions in slow than in fast display conditions. Comprehension was maximal for display sizes of about nine characters regardless of display rates. Implications for presenting Chinese text in this format are briefly discussed.

Dynamic Chinese text on a single-line display: effects of presentation mode

There are many technologies with which users must read text from small-screen electronic devices. So, understanding the constraints and optimization of humans' use of these devices is important. In the present study, the optimal ways to display Chinese text on a single-line display were explored. 64 Chinese-speaking Taiwanese undergraduates participated in a 4x2 mixed design in which the presentation mode was a between-subjects factor and the text difficulty was a within-subjects factor. Four presentation modes in which two presentation formats, i.e., leading and rapid serial visual presentation, combined with two text layouts, i.e., convention and Interword spacing, were investigated. Chinese texts of High Difficulty and Low Difficulty were compared. The results showed that the leading format with Interword spacing resulted in greater reading efficiency and faster preferred reading speed than other presentation modes. Although the reading efficiency and preferred reading speed for Low Difficulty materials were significantly greater than for High Difficulty materials, the interaction between the presentation mode and text difficulty was not significant. The applications for presenting moving Chinese text on a single-line display are briefly discussed.

Lexical processing during saccadic eye movements

Three experiments examined whether processes devoted to word recognition and word identification are suppressed during saccades, as most eye movement and reading researchers implicitly assume. In the first two experiments, subjects made short or long saccades while performing lexical decisions; lexical decision latency and accuracy were unaffected by saccade distance, and post-saccadic processing time was reduced when a long as opposed to a short saccade was made. Experiment 3 showed that word identification is more accurate when a long as opposed to a short saccade separates the presentation of a word and the presentation of a mask. These results demonstrate that lexical processing is not suppressed during saccades, so saccade durations should be taken into account in eye movement studies of reading. The implications of the results for current theories of cognitive suppression during saccades are discussed.

Reading text presented on a small display

There are a number of applications in consumer and industrial product environments in which there is a need to display a message in a restricted space. Two general display methods were compared in the present research using an eight-character horizontal display. Text appeared either as a sequence of small right-to-left jumps ('leading'), or as a sequence of whole or part-word patterns (rapid serial visual presentations, RSVP). Upper-case versus lower-case letters and slow (171 words per minute, wpm) versus fast (260 wpm) presentation rates were compared. In all conditions, sentences were read more accurately in the RSVP format than in the leading format. Recommendations for future displays of verbal messages are discussed.

Saccadic overhead: information-processing time with and without saccades

Information-processing time was compared for serial and spatially distributed visual presentations with performance measures that permit the separation of total time into its during-display and post-display components. For all subjects, there was a significant saccadic overhead, that is, less time was required with the serial format, which allowed data access without eye movements. However, the magnitude of the overhead decreased as task complexity increased. All subjects were able to exercise some control over the distribution of total processing time, trading off short during-display times with longer post-display times and vice versa.

Reading without saccadic eye movements

To assess the limitation on reading speed imposed by saccadic eye movements, we measured reading speed in 13 normally-sighted observers using two modes of text presentations: PAGE text which presents an entire passage conventionally in static, paragraph format, and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) which presents text sequentially, one word at a time at the same location in the visual field. In Expt 1, subjects read PAGE and RSVP text orally across a wide range of letter sizes (2X to 32X single-letter acuity) and reading speed was computed from the number of correct words read per minute. Reading speeds were consistently faster for RSVP compared to PAGE text at all letter sizes tested. The average speeds for text of an intermediate letter size (8X acuity) were 1171 words/min for RSVP and 303 words/min for PAGE text. In Expt 2 subjects read PAGE and RSVP text silently and a multiple-choice comprehension test was administered after each passage. All subjects continued to read RSVP text faster, and 6 subjects read at the maximum testable rate (1652 words/min) with at least 75% correct on the comprehension tests. Experiment 3 assessed the minimum word exposure time required for decoding text using RSVP to minimize potential delays due to saccadic eye movement control. Successive words were presented for a fixed duration (word duration) with a blank interval (ISI) between words. The minimum word duration required for accurate oral reading averaged 69.4 msec and was not reduced by increasing ISI. We interpret these results as an indication that the programming and execution of saccadic eye movements impose an upper limit on conventional reading speed.

Psychology of computer use: XV. Effects of display format on reading text from a CRT

Comprehension of brief computer-displayed text was investigated. Question-answering ability was affected by both rate of text presentation and text difficulty. More importantly, though, text presented one word at a time was comprehended better than text presented in multiword units or chunks. Results are discussed with regard to optimizing reading from computer displays.