Accurate Reading with Sequential Presentation of Single Letters

Abstract

Rapid, accurate reading is possible when isolated, single words from a sentence are sequentially presented at a fixed spatial location. We investigated if reading of words and sentences is possible when single letters are rapidly presented at the fovea under user-controlled or automatically controlled rates. When tested with complete sentences, trained participants achieved reading rates of over 60 wpm and accuracies of over 90% with the single letter reading (SLR) method and naive participants achieved average reading rates over 30 wpm with greater than 90% accuracy. Accuracy declined as individual letters were presented for shorter periods of time, even when the overall reading rate was maintained by increasing the duration of spaces between words. Words in the lexicon that occur more frequently were identified with higher accuracy and more quickly, demonstrating that trained participants have lexical access. In combination, our data strongly suggest that comprehension is possible and that SLR is a practicable form of reading under conditions in which normal scanning of text is not possible, or for scenarios with limited spatial and temporal resolution such as patients with low vision or prostheses.

Chemical stimulation of rat retinal neurons: feasibility of an epiretinal neurotransmitter-based prosthesis

“…Hence, RGC stimulation around 30 Hz might produce near natural motion detection for many light conditions. Current electrical prostheses have been limited to temporal resolutions ranging between 2 and 20 Hz [50]. Our data suggest an achievable temporal resolution of 5.5 ± 0.5 Hz (mean ± sem, median 3.8 Hz) for glutamate stimulation, a result comparable to the previous study by Finlayson and Iezzi [22] and early generation electrical prostheses [51,52].…”

Transition From Sublexical to Lexico-Semantic Stimulus Processing

“…Therefore, a processing via the lexical route is theoretically possible. As previous studies could show (e.g., Price and Edwards, 2012), the serial presentation of individual visual letters of a word leads to a much slower processing speed (single letter reading: ∼60 words/min; whole word reading: ∼200 words/min). This indicates that the lexical route, going along with a significant increase in processing speed, is less involved in processing serially presented stimuli.…”