Consequently, it is generally accepted that, when reading from left to right, the perceptual span extends much further to the right of fixation than to the left. These characteristics of the perceptual span for English (and other languages that are read from left to right) seem to survive over various viewing conditions (e.g., viewing distance and size of print, ). Studies using this paradigm have been highly informative about the perceptual span for English and other alphabetic systems that are read from left to right, and have shown that skilled readers of English obtain useful information from an asymmetric area that extends approximately 14–15 character spaces to the right of fixation but no more than about 3–4 character spaces to the left – and typically no further than the beginning of the fixated word. The amount that this window of normal text extends to the right and left of fixation is usually varied across trials in an experiment and is informative about the amount of text that must be shown normally at the reader's point of fixation for reading performance to be normal. These changes are made sufficiently rapidly that the reader has the phenomenological experience that the window moves in perfect synchrony with their eye movements. This region (or window) of normal text is moved in synchrony with the reader's eye movements, so that when the reader moves their eyes to fixate a new location, only text at this new location is shown normally and all other text is obscured. This typically involves displaying a region of text as normal at the reader's point of fixation and obscuring text outside of this region (e.g., by replacing the original letters with xs). Estimates of the size of the perceptual span have been obtained using a gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigm in which changes are made to text dependent on the location of the reader's fixational pauses. However, the region of text from which this information primarily is acquired on each fixational pause (usually called the perceptual span, ) is limited. Normal reading relies on the reader making a series of saccadic eye movements along each line of text, separated by periods of brief fixational pauses during which the eyes are relatively stationary and visual information is acquired from the text (for reviews, see, ).
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