Experiment 1 compared paragraph comprehension for texts shown either as normal pages on a computer terminal screen or as rapid serial visual presentations (RSVPs) of small text segments to a common location. Over several days of practice, reading comprehension was equivalent in the normal presentation mode and the RSVP format. When successive RSVP segments contained some information in common, to mimic the experience of successive parafoveal and foveal views of words in normal reading, comprehension was somewhat worse than when successive segments contained no overlapping information. Experiment 2 used a variety of segment size and segment duration combinations to investigate the optimal means of presenting text in the RSVP format. Across a variety of presentation rates and text difficulties, comprehension was maximal for segments averaging about 12 character spaces in length. In Experiment 3, texts were divided into short idea units or into random segments of equal average length. Comprehension was shown to be greater in the structured condition than in the random condition. An optimal means of presenting text in the RSVP format could be superior to normal presentation methods for reading and other text-processing tasks.There are few methodologies that enable the study of ongoing reading processes without at the same time interfering with normal reading behavior. One such methodology consists of unobtrusively monitoring a reader's eye movement patterns. Eye movement studies have found that as a person reads a text he or she fixates parts of the text for varying amounts of time. The variability of fixation durations could reflect changing processing loads as a reader progresses through a text (Just & Carpenter, 1980). However, simply monitoring eye movements and fixation durations does not enable experimental control of the parts of text processed by a reader, the sequence of words a reader fixates, or the durations for which words are fixated. Rather, these are regulated by the reader and are, in fact, the variables measured in eye movement studies. Experimental control over what is seen and for

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