Abstract
Several cognitive components are thought to explain the relation of rapid serial naming and reading ability including the constructs of phonological access, attention, automaticity, articulation, global processing speed, and visual acuity. One cognitive component that has gone understudied when investigating rapid serial naming is parafoveal processing . The goal of the present study was to examine the role that parafoveal information, information outside the direct visual focal point, plays in the rapid serial naming task. Two experiments explicitly varied the amount and type of information available to the right of the focal point in manipulated versions of the rapid serial naming task. The performance of forty-one first-grade students were examined for differences between manipulated conditions and relations with reading outcomes at three levels of processing, low-level visual processing, initial lexical access, and higher-order cognition. Results suggested that initial visual processing occurs for the letter directly in the focal area, as well as the letter immediately following it, and that children who were better at rapid naming were significantly more impaired by the lack of parafoveal preview than were the children at the lowest end of the distribution of rapid naming performance.
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