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Oculomotor planning in RAN and reading: a strong test of the visual scanning hypothesis

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Abstract

The current study investigates the validity of the visual scanning hypothesis, which posits that rapid automatized naming (RAN) predicts reading skill partly because both require the ability to perform rapid sequential eye-movements. Our data consist of eye-movements collected while 124 young English speaking adults of variable reading skill read passages and performed six modifications of RAN. These modifications isolated articulatory, lexical, oculomotor and attentional task components of RAN. A further requirement for participants was to perform each of the RAN tasks in two directions—the habitual direction of reading (RAN forward) and from right to left and top to bottom (RAN backward). Participants who were better at oculomotor control in RAN-like tasks were better readers regardless of task type or direction. Our most crucial finding is that the explanatory contribution of oculomotor control in the RAN-reading relationship is independent of the practice effect afforded by the habitual direction of visual scanning in reading.

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Notes

  1. Performance of this cohort in RAN forward (but not RAN backward) conditions and passage reading is reported as Study 2 in Kuperman et al. (2016). Due to differences in aggregation (reading eye-movements are averaged by participant in this study, rather than by both a participant and text complexity) and trimming, minor differences in descriptive statistics may be observed between present analyses and those in Kuperman et al. Our analysis with different types of data trimming showed identical critical patterns.

  2. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the SSHRC Graduate Fellowship to the first author; the NIH R01 HD 073288 (PI Julie A. Van Dyke) to the second and third authors; and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council or Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant 402395-2012, the McMaster Arts Research Board funding, the Early Research Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, the CFI equipment grant, the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2; Kuperman, PI), and the SSHRC Partnership Training Grant 895-2016-1008 (Libben, PI) to the third author. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the Canadian government. An earlier version of this project was presented at the European Conference for Eye Movements, Aug 2017, Wuppertal, Germany.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University, Togo Salmon Hall 510, 280 Main St. W, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4M2, Canada

    Regina Henry & Victor Kuperman

  2. Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, USA

    Julie A. Van Dyke

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  1. Regina Henry
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Correspondence to Regina Henry.

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Henry, R., Van Dyke, J.A. & Kuperman, V. Oculomotor planning in RAN and reading: a strong test of the visual scanning hypothesis. Read Writ 31, 1619–1643 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9856-3

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