Veldre Aaron, Drieghe Denis, Andrews Sally
School of Psychology, University of Sydney.
School of Psychology, University of Southampton.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2017 Sep;43(9):1612-1628. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000425. Epub 2017 Apr 17.
We examined the effect of individual differences in written language proficiency on unspaced text reading in a large sample of skilled adult readers who were assessed on reading comprehension and spelling ability. Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing a low or high frequency target word, presented with standard interword spacing, or in one of three unsegmented text conditions that either preserved or eliminated word boundary information. The average data replicated previous studies: unspaced text reading was associated with increased fixation durations, a higher number of fixations, more regressions, reduced saccade length, and an inflation of the word frequency effect. The individual differences results provided insight into the mechanisms contributing to these effects. Higher reading ability was associated with greater overall reading speed and fluency in all conditions. In contrast, spelling ability selectively modulated the effect of interword spacing with poorer spelling ability predicting greater difficulty across the majority of sentence- and word-level measures. These results suggest that high quality lexical representations allowed better spellers to extract lexical units from unfamiliar text forms, inoculating them against the disruptive effects of being deprived of spacing information. (PsycINFO Database Record
我们在大量熟练的成年读者样本中，研究了书面语言能力的个体差异对无空格文本阅读的影响，这些读者接受了阅读理解和拼写能力评估。记录参与者阅读包含低频或高频目标词的句子时的眼动情况，这些句子以标准的词间间距呈现，或者处于三种未分割文本条件之一，这三种条件要么保留要么消除了单词边界信息。平均数据重复了先前的研究结果：无空格文本阅读与注视持续时间增加、注视次数增多、回视次数增加、扫视长度缩短以及词频效应增强有关。个体差异结果为导致这些效应的机制提供了见解。在所有条件下，较高的阅读能力与更高的整体阅读速度和流畅性相关。相比之下，拼写能力选择性地调节了词间间距的影响，拼写能力较差的人在大多数句子和单词层面的测量中表现出更大的困难。这些结果表明，高质量的词汇表征使拼写能力较好的人能够从不熟悉的文本形式中提取词汇单元，使他们免受缺乏间距信息的干扰影响。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
