Mediated Reading of the Partially Sighted

Abstract

The model presented extend current theorizing about reading by relating the underlying processes of skilled and average readers to those of poor readers. While the non-mediated reading process for skilled readers is immediately directed to the meaning of a word, the reading process for poor readers is mediated by the interruption of the individual letters constituting the word. The continuous interaction between the interpretation of single letters and reading for meaning of the word is what determines the slow reading rate for poor readers. An empirical study was carried out to demonstrate the viability of the present approach. A series of measures were derived to compare the reading process for good and poor partially sighted readers. The locus of the difference in reading rate between the two groups of subjects was confined mainly to the peripheral subprocesses of reading whereas the deeper and more semantic levels of the reading process were less affected.