Text 4 The study of reading skills is as old as written language. It is believed that it was approximately 3000 to 4000 BC when the first systematic efforts were made to teach people to read and to write. Egyptian scribes were taught these skills in formal schools, but we have no knowledge of the techniques that were used by them. The modern emphasis on the scientific study of reading dates from approximately 1887 when a French scientist named Javal discovered that the visual process in reading is not the technique people had originally assumed to be. It seems to most persons that as you read along a line of print your eye moves along smoothly recognizing words and phrases, one after the other, as it moves. Javal carefully observed the eyes of persons reading and discovered two quite important things. First, the eyes, rather than moving were stopped most of the time. Second, rather than moving slowly and smoothly along a line, they moved in extremely quick jumps from one point of fixation to the next. Javal was so struck by these jumps that he called eye movements saccadic after the French word "to jump". His findings were a surprise to many persons. If you are interested in trying out Javal’s experiment, watch a friend very carefully as he reads, paying particular attention to the movements of his eyes. If you want to get a clearer picture of these rapid eye movements, you might try a technique invented by Professor W. R. Miles. It is known as the Miles Peep-Hole Technique and consists of the very simple process of cutting a small hole in the center of a page of print and observing the reader through the hole. This puts your point of observation approximately where the reader is looking, and you get a very clear picture of the saccadic eye movements. The discovery of saccadic eye movements by Javal stimulated many other people to try to study in more detail the nature of the mechanical process of reading. One of the earliest techniques was an effort to record eye movements on paper by connecting a little pneumatic tube through a long series of pulleys and wires to a pen which would write on moving paper and jiggle back and forth as the eyes moved. This turued out to be a reasonable good way of finding out how many eye movements a person was making but it was quite uncomfortable for the person being tested. Another rather disturbing technique was the process of putting a spot of white material on the comer of the eye. The material was then photographed with a movie camera as the person read. During the period from 1900 to about 1920 a new technique in studying eye movements in reading came into use with the development of eye movement cameras. Another complicated set of the eye through a series and onto a spool of moving film. Early cameras of this type were extremely expensive and difficult to construct. One of the first was used at the University of Chicago, another at the University of Minnesota, and after a few years more of them were built in other institutions throughout the country. Since 1920, many modem scientists have studied the problem of accurate recordings of eye movements in reading. As a result, there are several more modem techniques in use today. Modem equipment includes highly sophisticated cameras with high-speed film, cameras in helmets which fit on the head of the reader and show a picture of what he sees as well as the location of his eye movements, and other complex film devices. One very expensive but useful price of recording equipment is an electronic device which measures the location of visual fixation by measuring the voltage across the eyeball and feeds the electronic information into a computer which plots the exact location of the center of vision. All of these mechanical, photographic, and electronic devices have given us a great deal of useful information about the reading process. The jumps from one eye fixation to the next are called ______.

A. staccado
B. saccate
C. saccadic
D. static