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Web Survey Bibliography

Title The When and Where of Reading in the Brain
Author Rayner, K.; Sereno, S.C
Source Brain and Cognition, 42, pp. 78-81
Year 2000
Access date 13.05.2014
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Abstract Skilled readers scan a text without apparent effort and, from successive glimpses, construct meaningful representations. Reading involves far more than simply identifying individual words, yet word recognition remains an indispensable component of written language comprehension and is a prudent point of entry for understanding concurrent brain activity. Within this domain, there is still much uncertainty: When in our brains are individual words recognized? Where exactly does this occur? What factors influence the word recognition process? Recording eye movements on-line is a methodology that has succeeded in uncovering facts about the time course of language processing without imposing artificial constraints on normal reading. The eye movement technique offers several advantages over traditional behavioral techniques. First, no secondary task is required of the reader. Second, it is well documented that processing a word in text is reflected in its fixation time (see Rayner, 1998, for a review). Readers spend less time fixating words that are shorter, occur more frequently, or are more predictable in context. Finally, fixation time as a response measure (about 250 ms) is much shorter than comparable lexical decision or naming times (about 500–800 ms) and less contaminated by response bias.
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Year of publication2000
Bibliographic typeJournal article
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Web survey bibliography - 2000 (46)