Abstract
Peripheral vision plays an important role in normal reading, but its role becomes larger for visually impaired people with central-field loss. This experiment studied whether lexical processing differs in central and peripheral vision through the analysis of word-frequency effects in lexical decisions. We asked two main questions: (1) Do central and peripheral vision differ in the time course of lexical processing? and (2) do central and peripheral vision differ in the quality of lexical processing? To address the first question, we examined the time course of frequency effects in central and peripheral vision over a range from 25 to 500 ms. We found that significant frequency effects occurred for the shortest exposures, 25-50 ms, in central vision, whereas significant frequency effects did not occur in peripheral vision until 100 ms. To address the second question, we used word-frequency effects as a marker for the nature of lexical processing. We compared frequency effects in central and peripheral vision for data within matched ranges of percent accuracy (0-20%, 20-40%, 40-60%, 60-80%, and 80-100%). We found that there was no difference in the pattern of frequency effects in central and peripheral vision at equivalent performance levels. We conclude that lexical processing is slower in peripheral vision, but the quality of lexical processing is similar in central and peripheral vision.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 2837-2846 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Vision Research |
Volume | 43 |
Issue number | 26 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2003 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by NIH Grant EY02934 to Gordon E. Legge. Some of these data were presented at the 2001 annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Florida. We thank Rudrava Roy for his technical help. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
Keywords
- Central vision
- Lexical processing
- Low vision
- Peripheral vision
- Reading
- Word recognition
- Word-frequency effects