In delineating the amount of orthographic information that can be processed in parallel during a single fixation, the visual attention (VA) span acts as a key component of the reading system. Previous studies focused on the contribution of VA span to normal and pathological reading in monolingual and bilingual children from different European languages, without direct cross-language comparison....

reading comprehension ability consists of multiple cognitive processes, and cloze tests have long been claimed to measure this ability as a whole. however, since the introduction of cloze test, different varieties of it have been proposed by the testers. thus, the present study was an attempt to examine the relatedness of cloze-elide test, multiple-choice (mc) cloze test, and c-test as three di...

Repository Citation Durette, Robert T., "Operation span task's susceptibility to math anxiety: Support from fluid intelligence" (2011). This experiment tested possible math anxiety effects on the two most prominent working memory span tasks, the operation span and reading span tasks. Math anxiety effects on the performance of the processing component of the operation span task, which is math ba...

The ability to recognize masked speech, commonly measured with a speech reception threshold (SRT) test, is associated with cognitive processing abilities. Two cognitive factors frequently assessed in speech recognition research are the capacity of working memory (WM), measured by means of a reading span (Rspan) or listening span (Lspan) test, and the ability to read masked text (linguistic clos...

Visual-span profiles are plots of letter-recognition accuracy as a function of letter position left or right of the midline. Previously, we have shown that contraction of these profiles in peripheral vision can account for slow reading speed in peripheral vision. In this study, we asked two questions: (1) can we modify visual-span profiles through training on letter-recognition, and if so, (2) ...

The perceptual span or region of effective vision during eye fixations in reading was examined as a function of reading speed (fast readers were compared with slow readers), font characteristics (fixed width vs. proportional width), and intraword spacing (normal or reduced). The main findings were that fast readers (reading at about 330 wpm) had a larger perceptual span than did slow readers (r...