Publications by authors named "Ronan G Reilly"

This paper explores the processes underlying eye movement control in Chinese reading among a population of young 4th and 5th grade readers. Various proposals to explain the underlying mechanisms involved in eye movement control are examined and the paper concludes that the most likely account is of a two-factor process whereby the character is the main driver for longer saccades and that the word plays a role in shorter ones. A computational model is proposed to provide an integrated account of the dynamic interaction of these two factors.

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Objective: The notion that artistic capability increases with dementia is both novel and largely unsupported by available literature. Recent research has suggested an emergence of artistic capabilities to be a by-product of involuntary behaviour seen with dementia, as opposed to a progression in original thinking (de Souza, et al., 2010).

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It has recently been found that adult native readers of Thai, an alphabetic scriptio continua language, engage similar oculomotor patterns as readers of languages written with spaces between words; despite the lack of inter-word spaces, first and last characters of a word appear to guide optimal placement of Thai readers' eye movements, just to the left of word-centre. The issue addressed by the research described here is whether eye movements of Thai children also show these oculomotor patterns. Here the effect of first and last character frequency and word frequency on the eye movements of 18 Thai children when silently reading normal unspaced and spaced text was investigated.

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Thai has an alphabetic script with a distinctive feature - it has no spaces between words. Since previous research with spaced alphabetic systems (e.g.

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This article describes a cheap and easy-to-use finger-tracking system for studying braille reading. It provides improved spatial and temporal resolution over the current available solutions and can be used with either a refreshable braille display or braille-embossed paper. In conjunction with a refreshable braille display, the tracking system has the unique capacity to implement display-change paradigms derived from sighted reading research.

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We have developed EyeMap, a freely available software system for visualizing and analyzing eye movement data specifically in the area of reading research. As compared with similar systems, including commercial ones, EyeMap has more advanced features for text stimulus presentation, interest area extraction, eye movement data visualization, and experimental variable calculation. It is unique in supporting binocular data analysis for unicode, proportional, and nonproportional fonts and spaced and unspaced scripts.

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According to Pulvermüller (1999), words are represented in the brain by cell assemblies (Hebb, 1949) distributed over different areas, depending on semantic properties of the word. For example, a word with strong visual associations will be represented by a cell assembly involving neurons in the visual cortex, while a word suggesting action will selectively activate neurons in the motor areas. The present work aims to test the latter hypothesis by means of behavioural measures.

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