Reading as a Perceptual Process

This book is divided into five sections dealing with various fundamental issues in current research: attention, information processing and eye movement control; the role of phonology in reading; syntax and discourse processing and computational models and simulations. Control and measurement of eye movements form a prominent theme in the book. A full understanding of the where and when of eye movement control is a prerequisite of any complete theory of reading, since it is precisely at this point that perceptual and cognitive processes interact.

Amongst the 'hot topics' included are the relation between parafoveal and foveal visual processing of linguistic information, the role of phonology in fluent reading and the emergence of statistical 'tuning' approaches to sentence parsing.

Also discussed in the book are three attempts to develop quantitative models of reading which represent a significant departure in theory-building and a quantum step in the maturation of reading research.

Much of the work reported in the book was first presented at the 5th European Workshop on Language Comprehension organised in April 1998 which was held at the CNRS Luminy Campus, near Marseilles. All contributions summarise the state-of-the-art in the relevant areas of reading research.

Section and selected chapter headings: Visual Word Processing. Traces of print along the visual pathway (T.A. Nazir). Processing of Finnish compound words in reading (J. Hyönä, A. Pollatsek). Attention, Information Processing and Eye Movement Control. Relations between spatial and temporal aspects of eye movement control (R. Radach, D. Heller). Eye guidance and the saliency of word beginnings in reading text (W. Vonk et al.). Phonology in Reading. The assembly of phonology in Italian and English: consonants and vowels (L. Colombo). Do readers use phonological codes to activate word meanings? Evidence from eye movements (M. Daneman, E.M. Reingold). Syntax and Discourse Processing. Decoupling syntactic parsing from visual inspection: the case of relative clause attachment in French (J. Pynte, S. Colonna). Unrestricted race: a new model of syntactic ambiguity resolution (R.P.G. van Gompel et al.). Models and Simulations. Eye fixation durations in reading: models of frequency distributions (G.W. McConkie, B.P. Dyre). Subject index.