In the context of HEP reading is conceptualized as a complex orchestration of perceptual, cognitive and motor processes in the service of extracting meaning from print. Perceptual processes include the encoding and identification of letters, while cognitive processes include grapheme-to-phoneme mapping for letters and letter combinations, semantic comprehension of words and syntactic ambiguity resolution across entire sentences. Finally, motor processes involve the planning and execution of targeted eye movements from one word to the next in order to integrate the spatially distributed information.
At the perceptual level, manipulations of line length, font, and contrast polarity (white characters on black background or vice versa) have been used in experiments aimed at improving simple legibility. For example, we know from classical work by Tinker that readers benefit from medium-long lines and that high positive contrast polarity (black on white) is more reader-friendly than high negative contrast polarity (white on black) or low contrast (grey text). Contrast manipulations have been used to study the interplay between overt attention shifts (eye movements) and so-called covert attention shifts (which occur independent of eye movements and refer to our ability to process information from peripheral vision). Differences in contrast or contrast polarity are common in works of electronic literature.
An HEP use of contrast effects is found in a study by Reingold and Rayner, who tested whether our covert attention is allocated serially to one word at a time or in parallel across multiple words within a line of text. They presented readers with normal black text on white background that included a single low contrast (faint) word. Once this word was fixated the authors measured the time it took readers to process the next word, also referred to as parafoveal word. If covert attention is deployed serially then the perceptual difficulty of a faint word should not affect processing of the parafoveal (normal) word. This is so because we would only attend to it once the fixated word has been successfully encoded, regardless of whether this is a fast or slow process. However, if we attend to multiple words at the same time, then two alternative predictions emerge: either the perceptual difficulty induced by the low contrast word should withdraw attentional resources from the simultaneous processing of other words, thus prolonging the dwell time of the eyes on the subsequent parafoveal word; or the longer dwell time on the faint word might enable more extensive parallel preprocessing of the parafoveal word, thus reducing the time it would subsequently take to read it. Consistent with the serial model of attention allocation, the authors found that there was indeed a strong effect of perceptual degradation on the dwell time on the faint word, but no penalty for processing the parafoveal word once it was fixated. Part of the point of this experiment was to support a model of the reading process (“the EZ Reader Model”) which distinguishes between “two stages of lexical processing: an early stage (L1), which includes the extraction and identification of the orthographic form of the word, and a later stage (L2), which is solely involved with processing at the phonological and semantic level” (Reingold and Rayner, 745). It was found that the “stimulus quality” of the word (in this instance, how faint or dark it was), affected the first stage but not the second.
At the perceptual level, manipulations of line length, font, and contrast polarity (white characters on black background or vice versa) have been used in experiments aimed at improving simple legibility. For example, we know from classical work by Tinker that readers benefit from medium-long lines and that high positive contrast polarity (black on white) is more reader-friendly than high negative contrast polarity (white on black) or low contrast (grey text). Contrast manipulations have been used to study the interplay between overt attention shifts (eye movements) and so-called covert attention shifts (which occur independent of eye movements and refer to our ability to process information from peripheral vision). Differences in contrast or contrast polarity are common in works of electronic literature.
An HEP use of contrast effects is found in a study by Reingold and Rayner, who tested whether our covert attention is allocated serially to one word at a time or in parallel across multiple words within a line of text. They presented readers with normal black text on white background that included a single low contrast (faint) word. Once this word was fixated the authors measured the time it took readers to process the next word, also referred to as parafoveal word. If covert attention is deployed serially then the perceptual difficulty of a faint word should not affect processing of the parafoveal (normal) word. This is so because we would only attend to it once the fixated word has been successfully encoded, regardless of whether this is a fast or slow process. However, if we attend to multiple words at the same time, then two alternative predictions emerge: either the perceptual difficulty induced by the low contrast word should withdraw attentional resources from the simultaneous processing of other words, thus prolonging the dwell time of the eyes on the subsequent parafoveal word; or the longer dwell time on the faint word might enable more extensive parallel preprocessing of the parafoveal word, thus reducing the time it would subsequently take to read it. Consistent with the serial model of attention allocation, the authors found that there was indeed a strong effect of perceptual degradation on the dwell time on the faint word, but no penalty for processing the parafoveal word once it was fixated. Part of the point of this experiment was to support a model of the reading process (“the EZ Reader Model”) which distinguishes between “two stages of lexical processing: an early stage (L1), which includes the extraction and identification of the orthographic form of the word, and a later stage (L2), which is solely involved with processing at the phonological and semantic level” (Reingold and Rayner, 745). It was found that the “stimulus quality” of the word (in this instance, how faint or dark it was), affected the first stage but not the second.
