Perceptual span in reading Aksharic Kannada

Perceptual span, the effective visual field in reading covered in a single fixation, varies across orthographies. The perceptual span for reading English covers 3-4-character spaces to the left of fixation and around 14-15-character spaces to the right of the fixation while for Chinese it is one character space to the left and 3-character spaces to the right of the fixation. In the present study, we estimated the perceptual span for Kannada, a major South Indian language written in akshara (abugida type) using the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm. We recorded eye movements from skilled Kannada readers when they read sentences in different window sizes and compared the eye movement measures with that of full-length sentence reading. Results showed that the perceptual span for Kannada covers one akshara to the left and 6-akshara to the right of the fixation. Future studies need to establish whether all Akshara orthographies show a similar percentual span.