The main finding is clear and surprising in a simple way. Both deaf and hearing signers had a leftward span about 10 characters wide, while hearing nonsigners averaged only four characters. This points to sign language experience as a driver of expanded left-side visual sampling; producing signs with the right hand sends attention into the left visual field repeatedly, which appears to reshape how readers gather information. At the same time, deaf signers read more efficiently overall — they read faster, skipped more words, and regressed less — so their reading advantage cannot be explained solely by that wider leftward window.
For anyone curious about how language modality and sensory experience change the mind, this work suggests a link between everyday body-based attention and written-language processing. The results matter for educators and technologists designing reading supports or assessment for diverse learners, and they raise questions about whether targeted visual training could shift reading span and fluency. Follow the full article to see the methods and what this might mean for inclusive approaches to literacy and human potential.
Abstract
Both deafness and sign language experience impact the distribution of visual attention, and either factor could affect reading span size, the area around fixation from which useful information is obtained. In contrast to the typical asymmetrical span (smaller on the left), deaf signers have a larger leftward span than skill-matched hearing readers. We investigated whether this enhanced span is due to changes in visual attention associated with early deafness or sign language experience (right-handed signs fall in the left periphery). A gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm was used to assess the leftward reading span of hearing early signers, deaf early signers, and hearing nonsigners with similar reading abilities. The size of the leftward span for deaf and hearing signers was the same (10 characters) and was larger than that of hearing nonsigners (4 characters). Thus, sign language experience appears to be at least one source of the larger leftward span in deaf signers. However, deaf signers were more efficient readers than both hearing groups (faster reading rate, more skipped words, fewer regressions), suggesting that their greater reading efficiency does not stem solely from a larger leftward span.
