Processing of Visible Language: (13 Nato Conference Series)

The organization of the page as a technological device and our acquisition of information from it were subjects of keen interest to psychologists and designers a century ago. Research on the topics proceeded briskly for more than a quarter of a century then, and was brought together in the still useful survey and analysis of them all that E. B. Huey published in 1908 as "The psychology and pedagogy of reading, with a review of the history of reading and writing and of methods, texts, and hygiene in reading. " Research on the psychological aspects of literacy tended to diminish after that peak, but research on design and on the technology of presenting infor- mation has flourished apace meanwhile. Perhaps somewhat stimulated by the reissue of Huey's book by MIT Press in 1968, psychologists have returned to the study of literacy. The symposium that the present volume reports was an effort to bring together again psychologists interested in literacy and related forms of information acquisition, graphics designers, and engineers actively involved in the development and deployment of the newer technology. During this century, psychologists, graphics designers, and engineers have lost much of the mutual communication that their joint enterprise should encourage. The design of machines has often followed the convenience of packaging, the design of displays has often followed the designer's personal esthetic.

Table of Contents:
Eye Movements in Search and Reading.- The Control of Eye Movements in Reading (Tutorial Paper).- On the Role and Control of Eye Movements in Reading.- Moment to Moment Control of Eye Saccades as a Function of Textual Parameters in Reading.- Eye Movements in Reading: Eye Guidance and Integration.- Understanding the Reading Process through the Use of Transformed Typography: PSG, CSG and Automaticity.- Reading and Searching through Geometrically Transformed Text.- Reading Eye Movements, Macro-structure and Comprehension Processes.- Design of Graphic Language.- A Schema for the Study of Graphic Language (Tutorial Paper).- Typography: A Technique of Making a Text ‘Legible’.- Making Maps Easy to Read- - A Summary of Research.- Typographic Access Structures for Educational Texts.- The Use of Visual Cues in Text.- Relations between the Qualifications of Different Groups of Readers and Different Aspects of Text.- Word Perception and its Role in Reading.- Word Recognition in Reading (Tutorial Paper).- Facilitation in Word Recognition: Experiments Causing Change in the Logogen Model.- Word Knowledge and Letter Recognition as Determinants of Word Recognition.- Orthographic Regularities in English Words.- Rule-governed and Wholistic Encoding Processes in Word Perception.- Spelling Patterns, Letter Cancellation and the Processing of Text.- Perceiving and Producing.- Reading and Listening (Tutorial Paper).- Working Memory and Reading.- A Direct Access from Graphics to Meaning: A Study of the Stroop Effect in Sentences.- Reading by Eye and Writing by Ear.- A Comparison of Explicit and Implicit Knowledge of an Alphabet.- The Perception of Language Cohesion during Fluent Reading.- When Two No’s Nearly Make a Yes: A Study of Conditional Imperatives.- Styles and Strategies in SilentReading.- Technological Media Designed for Visual Presentation.- The Design of Technological Displays (Tutorial Paper).- Electronic Paperwork Processing in the Office of the Future.- Television Text: First Experience with a New Medium.- Non-serial Language.- Paragraphs of Pictographs: The Use of Non-verbal Instructions for Equipment.- Computer Aided Design of Graphic Symbols.- Name Index.