The visual span is the number of letters, arranged horizontally as in text, that can be recognized without moving the eyes. It represents a sensory bottom-up bottleneck that limits reading speed (Legge et al., 2007). In adult fluent readers, the visual span equals the uncrowded span, the number of characters that are not crowded. Reading rate is proportional to the uncrowded span (Pelli and Tillman, 2008). But what about learning to read? Developmental growth of the visual span accounts for 35-52% of the reading speed variability in english speaking children (Kwon et al., 2007). Here we investigate whether this relationship applies to French speaking children and to dyslexics.
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