Reading between Eye Saccades

Background: Skilled adult readers, in contrast to beginners, show no or little increase in reading latencies as a function of the number of letters in words up to seven letters. The information extraction strategy underlying such efficiency in word identification is still largely unknown, and methods that allow tracking of the letter information extraction through time between eye saccades are needed to fully address this question. Methodology/Principal Findings: The present study examined the use of letter information during reading, by means of the Bubbles technique. Ten participants each read 5,000 five-letter French words sampled in space-time within a 200 ms window. On the temporal dimension, our results show that two moments are especially important during the information extraction process. On the spatial dimension, we found a bias for the upper half of words. We also show for the first time that letter positions four, one, and three are particularly important for the identification of five-letter words. Conclusions/Significance: Our findings are consistent with either a partially parallel reading strategy or an optimal serial reading strategy. We show using computer simulations that this serial reading strategy predicts an absence of a wordlength effect for words from four- to seven letters in length. We believe that the Bubbles technique will play an importan

Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect

We examine a high-profile phenomenon known as the bouba–kiki effect, in which non-word names are assigned to abstract shapes in systematic ways (e.g. rounded shapes are preferentially labelled bouba over kiki). In a detailed evaluation of the literature, we show that most accounts of the effect point to predominantly or entirely iconic cross-sensory mappings between acoustic or articulatory properties of sound and shape as the mechanism underlying the effect. However, these accounts have tended to confound the acoustic or articulatory properties of non-words with another fundamental property: their written form. We compare traditional accounts of direct audio or articulatory-visual mapping with an account in which the effect is heavily influenced by matching between the shapes of graphemes and the abstract shape targets. The results of our two studies suggest that the dominant mechanism underlying the effect for literate subjects is matching based on aligning letter curvature and shape roundedness (i.e. non-words with curved letters are matched to round shapes). We show that letter curvature is strong enough to significantly influence word–shape associations even in auditory tasks, where written word forms are never presented to participants. However, we also find an additional phonological influence in that voiced sounds are preferentially linked with rounded shapes, although this arises only in a purely auditory word–shape association task. We conclude that many previous investigations of the bouba–kiki effect may not have given appropriate consideration or weight to the influence of orthography among literate subjects

Parents\u27 involvement in children\u27s schooling: A multidimensional conceptualization and motivational model

This study had 2 goals. The first was to examine a multidimensional conceptualization of parent involvement in children\u27s schooling, defined as the allocation of resources to the child\u27s school endeavors. A second goal was to evaluate a model in which children\u27s motivational resources (i.e., perceived competence, control understanding, and self‐regulation) are mediators between parent involvement and children\u27s school performance. 300 11–14‐year‐old children and their teachers participated. Factor analyses of a set of parent involvement measures supported the hypothesized 3 dimensions of parent involvement: behavior, intellectual/cognitive, and personal. Path analyses revealed indirect effects of mother behavior and intellectual/cognitive involvement on school performance through perceived competence and control understanding, and indirect effects of father behavior on school performance through perceived competence. The results argue against a unidimensional understanding of parent involvement and support the view of the child as an active constructor of his or her school experience. Copyright © 1994, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserve