In reply to White spaces:
[Bill] “Peter confirms the figure of 5-8 letters in the fovea.”
Actually I didn’t.
I said “Also, in the near parafoveal, just beyond the reach of foveal vision, there can be what is called “eccentric enhancement” of what strictly speaking falls in the near parafovea just outside the actual fovea. This has the effect of enlarging the “uncrowded span” to the point where 5 to 8 letter words are fully accessible in a single fixation to parallel processing.”
As explained in the wikipedia lemma on eye movements in reading, only four to five letters are seen with 100% acuity. The uncrowded window of object recognition stretches a bit beyond what foveal vision yields if the spacing between letters is wider than the critical spacing for crowding.
Also in the wikipedia lemma: “The distance the eye moves in each saccade (or short rapid movement) is between 1 and 20 characters with the average being 7–9 characters.” The cited source for this is Karl Rayner and colleagues, but the average of 7-9 characters sound a bit low to me and might be somewhat misleading, because saccade length depends on the visio-spatial composition of the linguistic information in parafoveal vision. If there is a short function word like ‘is’ or ‘the’ followed by a longer substance word, I think the saccade is considerably longer than when a key noun is followed by an important verb, or an important adjective is followed by the noun it modifies.
And by the way, I didn’t say function words are ignored!