Visual‐attentional span and lexical ­decision in skilled adult readers

Abstract

The goal of the study was to examine the association between visual‐attentional span and lexical decision in skilled adult readers. In the span tasks, an array of letters was presented briefly and recognition or production of a single cued letter (partial span) or production of all letters (whole span) was required. Independently of letter recognition and phoneme awareness, width of partial recognition span predicted substantial variance only in detection of letter misorderings in words, while partial span efficiency made small contributions to decisions on regular words and pseudowords, but not strange words. With a production format and the inclusion of short‐term phonological memory, neither partial‐span nor whole‐span measures contributed positive independent variance to word and nonword decisions. The results provide meagre support for the idea that skilled adult readers with a wide visual‐attentional span might process words more effectively than those with a narrow span during lexical decision.

The visual‐attention span deficit in developmental dyslexia: Review of evidence for a visual‐attention‐based deficit

“…Second, the deficit when observed in the whole report condition was also found in partial report (Bosse et al, 2007;Valdois et al, 2021;Zoubrinetzky et al, 2014) and scores on the two tasks were highly correlated (correlation coefficients varying from .44 to .71; Bosse et al, 2007;Bosse & Valdois, 2009;Chan & Yeung, 2020;C. Chen et al, 2016;Holmes & Dawson, 2014;Valdois et al, 2021;Zoubrinetzky et al, 2014).…”

“…Group studies reported small to no correlations between performance on verbal STM and oral VAS tasks in dyslexic individuals (C. Chen, Schneps, Masyn, & Thomson, 2016; Cheng et al, 2021). Second, the deficit when observed in the whole report condition was also found in partial report (Bosse et al, 2007; Valdois et al, 2021; Zoubrinetzky et al, 2014) and scores on the two tasks were highly correlated (correlation coefficients varying from .44 to .71; Bosse et al, 2007; Bosse & Valdois, 2009; Chan & Yeung, 2020; C. Chen et al, 2016; Holmes & Dawson, 2014; Valdois et al, 2021; Zoubrinetzky et al, 2014). Although no study provided a direct comparison of performance in the whole and partial report tasks, similar levels were typically reported, or slightly higher performance in partial report (Bosse et al, 2007; Bosse & Valdois, 2009; Saksida et al, 2016; Zoubrinetzky et al, 2014, 2016).…”

“…This holds even for the partial oral report paradigm since the location of the target is unpredictable and the location cue is only displayed at the offset of the multielement string. Several paradigms were subsequently designed to assess VAS (for details see Supplementary Material), including tasks of non‐oral partial report (Collis et al, 2013; Hawelka, Huber, & Wimmer, 2006; Hawelka & Wimmer, 2005; Holmes & Dawson, 2014), visual‐1 back (Banfi et al, 2018; Chan & Yeung, 2020; Cheng et al, 2021; Huang, Lorusso, Luo, & Zhao, 2019; Lallier, Acha, & Carreiras, 2016; Lallier et al, 2018; Zhao et al, 2018a; Zhao, Kwok, Liu, Liu, & Huang, 2017; Zhao, Liu, Liu, & Chen, 2018b), two‐alternative forced choice (Jones, Branigan, & Kelly, 2008; Pammer, Lavis, Cooper, Hansen, & Cornelissen, 2005; Pammer, Lavis, Hansen, & Cornelissen, 2004; Yeari et al, 2017; Ziegler et al, 2010) and categorization (Lobier, Peyrin, Le Bas, & Valdois, 2012; Lobier, Peyrin, Pichat, Le Bas, & Valdois, 2014; Lobier, Zoubrinetzky, & Valdois, 2012; Peyrin et al, 2012; Peyrin, Démonet, Baciu, Le Bas, & Valdois, 2011). If the constraints of brief visual display and multielement processing were met in most studies, differences in the implementation of these paradigms may have had a non‐trivial impact on performance and explain some discrepancy between the reported findings, as will be discussed below.…”