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During parafoveal processing, skilled readers encode letter identity independently of letter position (Johnson et al., 2007). In the current experiment, we examined orthographic parafoveal processing in readers with dyslexia. Specifically, the eye movements of skilled readers and adult readers with dyslexia were recorded during a boundary paradigm experiment (Rayner, 1975). Parafoveal previews were either identical to the target word (e.g., nearly), a transposed-letter preview (e.g., enarly), or a substituted-letter preview (e.g., acarly). Dyslexic and non-dyslexic readers demonstrated orthographic parafoveal preview benefits during silent sentence reading and both reading groups encoded letter identity and letter position information parafoveally. However, dyslexic adults showed, that very early in lexical processing, during parafoveal preview, the positional information of a word's initial letters were encoded less flexibly compared to during skilled adult reading. We suggest that dyslexic readers are less able to benefit from correct letter identity information (i.e., in the letter transposition previews) due to the lack of direct mapping of orthography to phonology. The current findings demonstrate that dyslexic readers show consistent and dyslexic-specific reading difficulties in foveal and parafoveal processing during silent sentence reading.

For both adult and child readers of English, the first letter of a word plays an important role in lexical identification. Using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, we examined whether the first-letter bias in parafoveal preprocessing is phonologically or orthographically driven and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Participants read sentences that contained either a correctly spelled word in preview (identity; e.g., "circus"), a preview letter string that maintained the phonology but manipulated the orthography of the first letter (P + O- preview; e.g., "sircus"), or a preview letter string that manipulated both the phonology and the orthography of the first letter (P- O- preview; e.g., "wircus"). There was a cost associated with manipulating the first letter of the target words in preview for both adults and children. Critically, during first-pass reading, both adult and child readers displayed similar reading times between P + O- and P- O- previews. This shows that the first-letter bias is driven by orthographic encoding and that the first letter's orthographic code in preview is crucial for efficient, early processing of phonology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

We examined whether typical frequency effects observed in normal reading would also occur in a target search task using non-linguistic Landolt-C stimuli. In an initial learning session, we simulated development of frequency effects by controlling exposures participants received of Landolt-C clusters during learning. In a subsequent scanning session, we manipulated the cluster demarcation form of linear strings of Landolt-C clusters (i.e., spaced vs. unspaced vs. shaded unspaced). Participants were required to scan and search for pre-learnt target clusters that were embedded in longer Landolt-C strings. During learning, frequency effects were successfully simulated such that targets with more exposures received shorter fixation time than those with fewer exposures. Participants were unable to successfully detect the pre-learnt targets when they were embedded in the strings during scanning. No evidence of frequency effects was observed in the scanning session. In contrast, eye-movement control was significantly influenced by cluster demarcation form, with increased difficulty for unspaced strings, less for shaded strings, and least for spaced strings. Furthermore, typical landing position distributions that occur in reading of spaced languages also occurred during scanning of spaced Landolt-C strings but not for the shaded or the unspaced strings. In conclusion, exposure frequency effects were successfully simulated during learning but did not carry over to target search during scanning of Landolt-C strings. Possible reasons why frequency effects did not occur in the scanning session are discussed.

Accuracy for reading comprehension and inferencing tasks has previously been reported as reduced for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), relative to typically developing (TD) controls. In this study, we used an eye movements and reading paradigm to examine whether this difference in performance accuracy is underpinned by differences in the inferential work required to compute a co-referential link. Participants read two sentences that contained a category noun (e.g., bird) that was preceded by and co-referred to an exemplar that was either typical (e.g., pigeon) or atypical (e.g., penguin). Both TD and ASD participants showed an effect of typicality for gaze durations upon the category noun, with longer times being observed when the exemplar was atypical, in comparison to typical. No group differences or interactions were detected for target processing, and verbal language proficiency was found to predict general reading and inferential skill. The only difference between groups was that individuals with ASD engaged in more re-reading than TD participants. These data suggest that readers with ASD do not differ in the efficiency with which they compute anaphoric links on-line during reading. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1968-1980. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have previously been reported to have difficulties with reading comprehension. This study examined whether a difference in the speed with which individuals with ASD form connections between words (co-reference processing) may contribute to comprehension difficulties. No evidence was found to suggest that ASD readers differ to typically developing readers in the speed of co-reference processing. Therefore, this data would suggest that differences in co-reference processing are unlikely to account for reading comprehension difficulties in ASD.

Previous research has suggested that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have difficulties understanding others communicative intent and with using contextual information to correctly interpret irony. We recorded the eye movements of typically developing (TD) adults ASD adults when they read statements that could either be interpreted as ironic or non-ironic depending on the context of the passage. Participants with ASD performed as well as TD controls in their comprehension accuracy for speaker's statements in both ironic and non-ironic conditions. Eye movement data showed that for both participant groups, total reading times were longer for the critical region containing the speaker's statement and a subsequent sentence restating the context in the ironic condition compared to the non-ironic condition. The results suggest that more effortful processing is required in both ASD and TD participants for ironic compared with literal non-ironic statements, and that individuals with ASD were able to use contextual information to infer a non-literal interpretation of ironic text. Individuals with ASD, however, spent more time overall than TD controls rereading the passages, to a similar degree across both ironic and non-ironic conditions, suggesting that they either take longer to construct a coherent discourse representation of the text, or that they take longer to make the decision that their representation of the text is reasonable based on their knowledge of the world.

We were particularly interested in whether binocular coordination when viewing stereoscopic images would be more comparable to when viewing a 2D representation, or when viewing a real stimulus array in depth.Data are reported from an experiment examining binocular coordination in response to stereoscopically presented stimuli. Movements of both eyes were recorded as participants viewed LED stimuli in a real scene with depth, a 2D image of the scene, and a stereoscopic image of the scene.When viewing real LEDs, vergence during saccades re-aligned the eyes in depth where necessary, with smaller adjustments during the following fixation. In contrast, when viewing the stereoscopic representation, vergence during saccades did not re-align the eyes in depth. The only effect of target depth on vergence occurred during the following fixation.We conclude that disparity in parafoveal objects, in isolation from other depth cues (and, minimally, conflicting with blur), was insufficient for the visual system to target saccades appropriately in depth.

In 3 eye-tracking experiments, the authors investigated the use of morphological information during pronoun resolution. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that disruption occurred when a preferred assignment was inconsistent with gender information. Experiment 2 ensured that this difficulty was not due to the introduction of a new discourse entity. Experiment 3 showed that disruption also occurred when number information was inconsistent with the preferred assignment. The results indicate that the use of morphological information is delayed until after the computation of coreference relations.