Sensory and cognitive determinants of reading speed

Fast readers and average readers were tested on four tasks. Neither peripheral letter identification nor susceptibility of foveal letter identification to patterned masking differed between the two groups. However, fast readers appear to pick up more information per fixation on structured textual material, as indexed by a forced-choice test. Furthermore, the average fast reader had a greater span of apprehension for unrelated elements. It appears that faster readers are able to encode more of the contents of each fixation, whether or not higher order linguistic structure is present. The results are inconsistent with the view that reading speed is dependent solely on the reader's ability to infer or fill in missing information.