pattern of word-to-word inspection makes up only a minority of cases, accounting for about twenty percent of all eye fixations. This is obviously an uncomfortable notion for proponents of the metaphor of the reader as listener, but it also poses some severe challenges for all theories of reading. If readers look at words in a haphazard way and process several at the same time, how do they manage to arrive at a single coherent understanding of what they are reading? Why is this chaotic pattern of inspection not reflected in a chaotic jumble of meanings? As some have argued, encoding multiple words simultaneously in reading seems implausible. Part of the answer may found by noting that printed text is not at all like the auditory stimulus we process when listening. For one thing, it is stable and relatively permanent: unlike speech, it remains out there, available to be re-examined at will. Text is not distributed in time; it is distributed in space, like a picture. When we look at a picture the claim that we encode multiple meanings simultaneously does not seem at all implausible because the visual system is designed to process objects in parallel. To take a concrete example, when we look at a tree, the temporal order of the fixations that fall on it is of no concern at all. It will be seen as a tree whatever the pattern of inspection. In fact there is little or no evidence for what might be termed a canonical scanpath, or "right way of looking", for a given object. Obviously, particular words convey particular meanings, but the fact that the medium (printed text) is spatially extended means that these meanings can be allocated to specific locations in space. The problem of multiple simultaneous representations disappears once it is accepted that their "simultaneity" is spatial, rather than temporal. The work of Kennedy and Pynte on non-canonical order in reading has proved controversial and has provoked a vigorous response from proponents of the serial view of reading. Books Studies in Long-Term Memory (with A.L. Wilkes). John Wiley & Sons (1975) The Psychology of Reading. London ; New York : Methuen, (1984). Reading as a Perceptual Process (with Radach, Heller and Pynte) North Holland; (2000), Eye movements and information processing during reading. (with Radach and Rayner). Psychology Press. (2004) The Boat in the Bay. [Fiction] Lasserrade Press; (2010), The Broken Bell. [Fiction]