Barrington , R. 1 , Liversedge , S. 2 & Kirkby, J. 1
1 Bournemouth University
2 University of Southampton
A single phonological deficit does not seem to be sufficient to cause dyslexia (Peterson & Pennington, 2012). One potential risk factor is weak visual attention (Bosse, Tainturier, & Valdois, 2007). The present study used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to examine whether dyslexic children extract information from the parafovea during reading. Eye-movements were recorded from children with dyslexia, typically developing children matched for chronological age and typically developing children matched for reading age. Parafoveal previews were either identical to the target (e.g., before), transposed-letter (e.g., ebfore) or substituted-letter (e.g., tcfore) non-words. The results showed disruption in reading for previews with transposed-letters and substituted-letters compared to identical previews, which occurred for all reading groups. However, in comparison to children matched for reading age, dyslexic readers required more fixations, longer refixation-durations, gaze-durations and total-readings times, indicating that while parafoveal processing is occurring in dyslexic reading, foveal processing requires increased visual sampling.