Visual Factors in Reading

by Cornelissen, Piers; Singleton, Chris

• ISBN13: 9781405160919
• ISBN10: 1405160918
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-05-14
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This collection of research papers examines the critical role that vision plays in learning to read. State-of-the-art research suggests that an overemphasis on phonological processes in reading has underestimated the importance of integrating a highly practiced vision system with the language system. Contributors, including Richard C. Shillcock, Marc Brysbaert and Carol Whitney, evaluate recent findings from neuro-imaging literature, along with important current work on how letters and letter strings are processed. From a variety of empirical and theoretical perspectives, these studies examine the impact that eye movement control, left and right visual fields, word shape, visual stress, and right and left hemispheres have on visual word recognition. Visual Factors in Reading explores the complex visual computations fundamental to reading and how they are implemented in the brain.

Author Biography

Piers L. Cornelissen is a Reader in Psychology at the University of York, UK. As an undergraduate he studied medicine at Worcester College, Oxford, UK, continuing his clinical training at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. He studied for a D.Phil. with Professor John Stein at the University Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford, funded by the Wellcome Trust. After three years as a McDonnell-Pew postdoctoral Fellow, he moved to Newcastle upon Tyne to take up a lectureship, and most recently to the University of York as a Reader. The main thrust of his research is to understand the neural basis of reading using a combination of psychophysical and neuroimaging techniques (MEG and fMRI).

Chris Singleton is a Chartered Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology at the University of Hull. His main research and professional interests are in the development of literacy and the identification and education of children and adults with dyslexia and other learning problems. He is internationally known for pioneering research that resulted in the development of computer-based systems for screening and assessment of dyslexia, visual stress and other cognitive difficulties, now widely used in schools, colleges and universities in the UK and elsewhere in the world. Dr Singleton is an editor of the Journal of Research in Reading and was chair of the National Working Party on Dyslexia in Higher Education.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors	p. vii
Preface	p. xi
Visual constraints in written word recognition: evidence from the optimal viewing-position effect	p. 1
Pre-schoolers, print and storybooks: an observational study using eye movement analysis	p. 13
Hemispheric division of labour in reading	p. 29
Dissociations between serial position and number of letters effects in lateralised visual word recognition	p. 43
Letter-position encoding and dyslexia	p. 59
The word shape hypothesis re-examined: evidence for an external feature advantage in visual word recognition	p. 87
Integration of the visual and auditory networks in dyslexia: a theoretical perspective	p. 105
The effect of print size on reading speed in dyslexia	p. 117
The relationship between dyslexia and Meares-Irlen Syndrome	p. 135
Visual stress in adults with and without dyslexia	p. 151
Index	p. 165
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