Help: MATLAB project!

Hi.
I should just start by saying I'm not asking for anyone to do parts of my project for me, don't worry!
I just need ideas and help because I'm new to MATLAB and find it really difficult. I've got this project to do:

"Write a computer program that will measure the time taken to read several sentences displayed upon the monitor. Each word from the sentence should be displayed upon the screen, one at a time. Each word presented should be displaced relative to the previous word by the correct number of characters (i.e. words are not to be presented wholly to the center of the screen). The output from the program should be the time taken to read each word from the sentence. Independent variables could include word length (in terms of characters, and nouns, verbs etc.)."

Any ideas on where I need to get started? I have no idea how to even begin this or how I'm going to do it... :(

Hi. I didnt understand what do you mean "read sentences"? I mean, how the user interacts with the program? Please give some details.
Regards,
Theodore

Basically it's a psychology experiment. I'll be presenting stimuli on the screen. The stimuli will be random sentences that I've created. So if the first sentence was "The dog ran after the cat." The participant would see:

"The" [When they've read the work they will press a button on the keyboard which will note how long it took them to read that word, and then present them with the next word]

" dog" [Again, the reading time is recorded and the next word presented]

" ran" [etc]

I have no idea how I'm meant to go about presenting this :/ I think I'm meant to make use of Psychtoolbox(an addon for matlab)