The Perceptual Span Of Deaf Middle School Students:An Eye Movement Study

Because of the early auditory impairment,deaf readers relied heavily on the visual channel to process information,resulting the changes of the visual attention resources around 7-13 years old.Lots of studies on deaf readers showed the enhanced attention in extrafoveal visual field,when they were asked to complete the low-level visual perceptual tasks.And this specific feature was found performing the same function in reading,because their enhanced parafoveal processing ability in Chinese reading was put forward.It’s of great importance to detect deaf readers’ reading perceptual span(the physical extent of an area from which useful visual information is extracted during a single fixation),whether it will be larger or not?The current study attempt to compare the Chinese reading perceptual span of deaf middle school students with their reading level matched primary school students and their age matched hearing middle school students using the eye-tracking technique and then to enrich the theory on deaf reading.The moving window paradigm was used to explore this issue.The design was a 3(groups:middle school deaf students、reading achievement matched hearing group、aged matched hearing group)x6(window size:WS1、WS2、WS3、WS4、WS5、FL)mixed design.The results demonstrated a larger perceptual span of middle school deaf students with 3-4 characters to the right of fixation compared with their reading level matched hearing students(2-3 characters to the right of fixation),and nearly to the aged matched hearing group(3-4 characters to the right of fixation),indicating that the extrafoveal visual attention enhancement of deaf readers did influence their reading perceptual span supporting their enhanced ability in parafoveal processing.