A Blank Look in Reading
The Effect of Blank Space on the Identification of Letters and Words During Reading
Abstract
Abstract. Two experiments investigated the effect of visual blank space on reading by varying the amount of interletter and interline blank space in prose passages. Increasing interletter blank spacing slowed the reading process overall, presumably because it disrupted the unitization of words and word identification, but it also improved the identification of the letters within words. By contrast, increasing interline blank spacing sped up the reading process overall, while also improving the identification of words and the letters within words, presumably because the extra spacing reduced the amount of visual information that was processed during reading. The latter finding supports the conclusion that information from surrounding lines of single-spaced text may interfere with reading.
References
(1985). The interaction of contextual constraints and parafoveal visual information in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 364– 390
(1985). Effects of presentation complexity on rapid-sequential reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 38, 461– 470
(1977). Detection errors on the and and: Evidence for reading units larger than the word. Memory & Cognition, 5, 636– 647
(1976). Serial position functions for letter identification at brief and extended exposure durations. Perception & Psychophysics, 19, 1– 15
(2004). The GO model: A reconsideration of the role of structural units in guiding and organizing text online. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 428– 433
(1976). Detection errors on the word the: Evidence for reading units larger than letters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2, 235– 242
(1994). Letter detection: A window to unitization and other cognitive processes in reading text. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1, 333– 344
(1987). Characterizing the processing units of reading: Effects of intra- and interword spaces in a letter detection task. In B. K. Britton & S. M. Glynn (Eds.), Executive control processes in reading (pp. 279-296). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
(1991). Semantic processing of unattended text during selective reading: How the eyes see it. Perception & Psychophysics, 49, 289– 294
(1992). Lack of semantic activation from unattended text during passage reading. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 30, 365– 366
(1981). Duplex perception of cues for stop consonants: Evidence for a phonetic mode. Perception & Psychophysics, 30, 133– 143
(1976). Asymmetry of the perceptual span in reading. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 8, 365– 368
(1995). Effect of meaning on letter detection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 82– 95
(1998). Effect of syntactic role and syntactic prominence on letter detection. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 96– 100
(1981). Saccade size in reading depends upon character spaces and not visual angle. Perception & Psychophysics, 30, 395– 396
(1991). Effective visual field size necessary for vertical reading during Japanese text processing. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 29, 345– 347
(1981). Asymmetries in the perceptual span for Israeli readers. Brain and Language, 14, 174– 180
(1993). The use of information below fixation in reading and in visual search. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47, 179– 200
(1997). Understanding eye movements in reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1, 317– 339
(1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 372– 422
(1969). Perceptual recognition as a function of meaningfulness of stimulus material. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 81, 275– 280
(1993). Detecting phonemes and letters in text: Interactions between different types and levels of processes. Memory & Cognition, 21, 739– 751
(1970). Processes in word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 1, 59– 85
