The idea of Matthew effects in reading--the widening achievement gap between good and poor reader--has attracted considerable attention in education research in the past 25 years. Despite the popularity of the topic, however, empirical studies that have analyzed the core assumption of Matthew effects in reading have produced inconsistent results.…

Reviews some findings obtained through comparisons of dyslexic readers with nondyslexic readers matched by chronological or reading age. Notes some of the problems and pitfalls associated with this approach. Explores the potential of other group comparisons when examining sources of reading difficulty, and discusses individual differences within…

Reviews research on lexical access (the process of getting information about a word from a mental dictionary). Discusses implications for comprehension development. Suggests that individual differences in comprehension depend on speed of lexical access as well as on speed of decoding. (SR)

Reviews several lines of convergent research to discuss the relationship between developmental dyslexia and slow symbol naming speed. Describes the interactive development of orthographic and phonological codes, and methodological problems leading to underestimation of the importance of individual differences. Argues that an understanding of…

Demonstrates how cognitive style can be a useful construct in understanding why some children learn to read easily while others do so with great difficulty. Overviews relevant findings from cognitive style research in areas related to both acquisition of word recognition skill and the development of comprehension processes. (MG)

Reviews the literature on the nature of processes within reading groups of different ability levels and the effects of these processes on children's reading development. Presents a perspective on instructional-social contexts for reading instruction. (AEA)

A review of interactive models of reading combined with the assumption of compensatory processes indicates that compared to poor readers, good readers appear to have superior strategies for comprehending and remembering large units of text and are superior at context-free word recognition. (MKM)

Of all cognitive styles, field dependence/independence (FD/I) is by far the most researched and has the greatest application potential to educational problems. Briefly stated, the FD/I dimension refers to people's ability to experience and interpret their environment in terms of a global versus analytic continuum. Field dependents are likely to…

Presents a framework for conceptualizing development of individual differences in reading ability that emphasizes the effects of reading on cognitive development and on "bootstrapping" relationships involving reading. Uses the framework to explicate some persisting problems in the literature on reading disability and to conceptualize…

To provide a framework for describing how children respond to picture books, first and second grade children were observed over a 10-week period. Variations in the responses of individual students, changes in their reactions over time, and the importance of considering the context of a response are discussed. (PP)

Reading encompasses a wide range of verbal processes, among them such simple verbal processes as word decoding, letter recognition, name retrieval, and semantic access. The question is whether simple verbal processing differences are adequate to account for general reading ability differences. Across different verbal domains and different ages,…

A review of research on "incomplete text," which refers to a variety of adaptations of cloze procedures, illustrates how construct validity has been considered and will need to be considered in future research on the subject. Much of the early research on incomplete text focused on product--providing quantitative assessments of…