Abstract:
The literacy crisis is a growing concern amongst the visually blind. The lack of literacy is attributed to the difficulty of learning braille. Braille is a complex skill and requires readers to move their finger over a series of raised dots. Many researchers have suggested that the difficultly is due to the serial and sequential nature of reading whereby readers process every character one at a time. Considering this account, it is surprising that Krueger (1982) obtained a word superiority effect. The aim of the present study was to replicate Krueger‟s (1982) study and to obtain a word superiority effect to discount the serial processing theory. A list of real words, pseudowords and nonwords were used in a search task where fluent braille readers had to search for a given target letter within each condition. In addition, we investigated serial position effects in braille reading to provide further evidence against this processing account. A newly adapted technique of recording finger movement data and examining their kinematic indices (Hughes et al, 2009) were used as a tool to investigate the superiority effect in a bid to generate data similar to eye movement data. A similar word advantage to that commonly cited was found. Variable evidence for a serial position effect was obtained. Results of kinematic variables were less convincing. With the exception of reversals, mean velocity of the reading finger and intermittencies reflected the motor control of the finger rather than showcasing the word superiority effect. We provided a number of accounts to explain the effects observed including a potential overlapping processing model that looks promising to account for the process of braille reading. This process may be mediated by the effects of familiarity and psychophysical In addition, we proposed that perhaps the perceptual unit of braille reading may be a pair of words known as a bigram. The conclusions drawn from the results are preliminary but one of the first to date.
