The Psychology And Pedagogy Of Reading PDF Download

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE EXTENT OF READING MATTER PERCEIVED DURING A READING PAUSE In looking casually over a printed page, one is apt to think that a very considerable portion of it is seen at any moment with distinctness enough for reading. The amount that can be seen thus distinctly is smaller than is generally supposed. The illusion may come partly from the fact that the retina's ability to discriminate brightnesses, or differences in the light and dark of the page, does not decrease from the point of clearest vision outward as far as is reached by both ends of the ordinary line, when one looks at the middle. So most of the page appears as bright in one part as another. Again, since by long experience we know that we can at once see distinctly any part of the field at will, and since we are usually unconscious of the eye-movements which make this possible, we naturally mistake the reading range given by several quick eye-movements, for that which is possible for the unmoved eye. However, if you will look fixedly at a letter in the middle of the page and will attempt to name the letters or words about it, without moving the eye for a single instant, youwill discover that the reading range of the unmoved eye is distinctly limited. Erdmann and Dodge, in trying this experiment on a page of German printed in good type, found that neither of them could see letters or words clearly beyond the ends of the lines represented in the diagram below, when fixating a letter at the central dot. Not all of even this amount could be seen clearly. Fig. 7 Some of you will be able to see all the letters distinctly over a little larger area than this; a few will not be able to do so well, for some readers are found to have a curiously limited range of distinct vision. However, if you have t...