ABSTRACT
More than a century of work on the psychology of reading has provided us with numerous insights into the factors that shape the human ability to extract meaning from written forms. Moreover, in a remarkable revelation of foresight, recent data from eye movement tracker technologies have conrmed what early reading theorists such as Huey (1908) argued must be happening when humans read words. The human eye operates via a series of ballistic movements, with a perceptual span that captures letters in the periphery of the focal point and enables us to extract meaning without directly viewing every word. By now we have established reliable parameters on typical reading speed and demonstrated the impact of certain typographic cueing on performance. As evinced by the latest edition of Rayner et al.’s Psychology of reading (2012), there is su€cient data on the psychological processes underlying reading that merely summarizing the research is a major undertaking.
