Experimental studies of word recognition in the low-literacy adult population

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The present proposal is a request for equipment support for a five-year NSERC Discovery research program entitled "Individual differences in visual recognition of morphologically complex words". A key part of this program is a series of experiments on reading of words with complex structure ("hope+ful"; "walk+s") in sentence contexts. We propose to use eye-tracking, or registration of participants' eye-movements during reading, as the state-of-the-art experimental technique in reading research. As has been widely demonstrated, temporal and spatial characteristics of eye-movements are indicative of the difficulty of cognitive processing of read materials. With the recorded eye-movements as dependent variables, we will be able to establish the role that individual cognitive (verbal and non-verbal) skills play in the processing of morphology.