Perceptual span in Turkish reading: a study on parafoveal information intake

Download
2017
Ormanoğlu, Zuhal
Perceptual span is the visual region where useful information can be collected at one fixation. This thesis investigates the size of the perceptual span of Turkish readers. Rayner (1975) found that the size of the perceptual span for English readers is about 14-15 characters to the right and 3-4 characters to the left of fixation. However, different characteristics of languages affect the size of the perceptual span. Being an agglutinative language and having shallow orthography are two features of Turkish that may have facilitative effect for readers. In an experiment using gaze contingent moving paradigm (N=48), we compared full paragraph condition with five different window size conditions (7, 11, 15, 19 and 23 characters to the right of fixation) in silent and oral reading. To imitate natural reading conditions, readers were presented paragraphs instead of single sentences. Preliminary results show a significant difference in eye movement measures (first fixation duration, first run dwell time, regression-in-count, regression-out-count) between full paragraph and window conditions. We have not observed a significant difference in reading rate. This suggests that the effect of parafoveal constraint follows a different pattern for Turkish readers, and this requires that perceptual span in Turkish should be investigated by a complementary approach. 

Suggestions

The Effects of word length and suffixation on eye movement control in Turkish reading
Bozkurt, Tuğçe Nur; Acartürk, Cengiz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2017)
Findings in reading research literature reveal that eyes do not move randomly during reading; instead, they follow patterns that enable studying cognitive processes underlying reading. Recent studies report the first fixation on a word as the major measure of lexical influences in reading. Subsequent fixations on a word are usually assumed to have different roles than the first fixation. In the present study, the relationship between the first fixation and subsequent fixations is investigated by taking into...
Recognition memory of visual objects: the effect of humor and relatedness of associated texts
Zengin, Deniz; Hohenberger, Annette Edeltraud; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2014)
This study investigates the effect of text type (humorous, positive, neutral) and relatedness (related, unrelated) and their possible interaction on memory of visual objects (chocolate bars) associated with those texts, using recognition memory and on-line eye-tracking methodologies. After studying object-text pairs during which their eye-gaze was monitored, participants performed an immediate and a delayed (2 weeks later) recognition memory task for the visual objects. Recognition memory results (hits, d')...
Object detection through search with a foveated visual system
Akbaş, Emre (2017-10-01)
Humans and many other species sense visual information with varying spatial resolution across the visual field (foveated vision) and deploy eye movements to actively sample regions of interests in scenes. The advantage of such varying resolution architecture is a reduced computational, hence metabolic cost. But what are the performance costs of such processing strategy relative to a scheme that processes the visual field at high spatial resolution? Here we first focus on visual search and combine object det...
Foveated image watermarking
Koz, A; Alatan, Abdullah Aydın (2002-09-25)
The spatial resolution of the human visual system (HVS) decreases rapidly away from the point of fixation (foveation point). By exploiting this fact, we propose a watermarking approach that embeds the watermark energy into the image peripheral according to foveation-based HVS contrast thresholds. Compared to the other HVS-based watermarking methods, the simulation results demonstrate an improvement in the robustness of the proposed approach against image degradations, such as JPEG compression, cropping and ...
Morphological Modeling of Position-Based Spatial Relationships
Cinbiş, Ramazan Gökberk (2007-06-13)
Spatial information plays a very important role in image understanding. Fuzzy mathematical morphology provides an effective basis for extracting binary and ternary spatial relationships by creating a fuzzy landscape where the value at each point corresponds to the relationship degree according to its position with respect to the reference object(s). We improve existing morphological approaches in terms of flexibility and efficiency while also obtaining more intuitive results. Our morphological definitions a...
Citation Formats
Z. Ormanoğlu, “Perceptual span in Turkish reading: a study on parafoveal information intake,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2017.