title: Word and line bisection in typical and impaired readers and a cross-language comparison.
abstract: Observers exhibit larger leftward bias when bisecting words compared with lines. According to the Attentional Scaling Hypothesis, attempting to access lexical entries involves focusing attention on the initial letters of words to establish a cohort of potential matches with entries in the mental lexicon. We test this account by examining two predictions: (1) greater leftward bias for words should be evident in English readers in which the word beginning is on the left but not in Hebrew readers. (2) Dyslexics who have lexical impairments should show greater bias. Results reveal that word length modulated bisection bias differently for Hebrew and English readers, although the bias stays always leftward. Furthermore, dyslexics exhibited an exaggerated leftward bias than controls. We propose this effect arises from an interaction between reading and spatial attention rather than from the scaling of attention relative to the beginning of the word in the service of lexical access.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; School of Education and Haddad Center for Research in Dyslexia and Learning Disabilities, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. Electronic address: yafitvha@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Yafit
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Gabay
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; Department of Psychology and The Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, University of Haifa, Israel.
authors.forename: Shai
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gabay
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
authors.forename: Avishai
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Henik
authors.affiliation: School of Education and Haddad Center for Research in Dyslexia and Learning Disabilities, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Schiff
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Marlene
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Behrmann
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D015982:Bias; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011932:Reading
keywords: Bisection; Hemi-spatial attention; Lexical processing; Reading direction; Word representation