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This article describes a cheap and easy-to-use finger-tracking system for studying braille reading. It provides improved spatial and temporal resolution over the current available solutions and can be used with either a refreshable braille display or braille-embossed paper. In conjunction with a refreshable braille display, the tracking system has the unique capacity to implement display-change paradigms derived from sighted reading research. This will allow researchers to probe skilled braille reading in significantly more depth than has heretofore been possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed EyeMap, a freely available software system for visualizing and analyzing eye movement data specifically in the area of reading research. As compared with similar systems, including commercial ones, EyeMap has more advanced features for text stimulus presentation, interest area extraction, eye movement data visualization, and experimental variable calculation. It is unique in supporting binocular data analysis for unicode, proportional, and nonproportional fonts and spaced and unspaced scripts. Consequently, it is well suited for research on a wide range of writing systems. To date, it has been used with English, German, Thai, Korean, and Chinese. EyeMap is platform independent and can also work on mobile devices. An important contribution of the EyeMap project is a device-independent XML data format for describing data from a wide range of reading experiments. An online version of EyeMap allows researchers to analyze and visualize reading data through a standard Web browser. This facility could, for example, serve as a front-end for online eye movement data corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a short overview of current issues in research on continuous reading in non-Roman orthographies. At the same time it also serves as an introduction to the present Reading and Writing Special Issue on this topic. The main questions examined in the contributions to this volume are closely related to issues that have been central to research debates on reading in English, German and French. However, we argue that these innovative approaches to the dynamics of reading in Chinese, Japanese and Korean go far beyond a simple comparative research strategy. Instead, by illuminating phenomena like word segmentation, parafoveal processing and semantic analysis from their unique perspectives, they provide valuable insights into the more general question of to what extent information processing in reading is universal as opposed to language specific. Moreover, we expect that these initial studies will trigger more basic research on non-alphabetic reading, providing a foundation for useful application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]