THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN READING WITH CENTRAL FIELD LOSS

It has been suggested that readers with central field loss (CFL) may n ot be able to use context to facilitate reading in the same way that n ormally sighted readers do because their processing capacity is fully utilized decoding the degraded visual stimulus. If true, this could ac count for their slow reading, even when text is appropriately magnifie d. Readers with CFL and normally sighted, age-matched controls read se ntences and lists of random words from two dynamic text displays. We u sed sentence-gain (the ratio of reading rates for sentences to random words) to assess the use of context. Sentence-gain was equivalent acro ss groups. Therefore, reduced reliance on context cannot explain the s lower reading rates of people with CFL.