Reading, like all areas of human learning, is complex and multidimensional. Educational psychology has an opportunity to contribute further to a science of reading, and potentially to a science of reading instruction, by expanding its traditional theoretical and methodological orientations to embrace this complexity. Topics central to this effort…

This article draws on Philip Barnard's model of the interactions between theory and practice, between basic and applied research, to investigate the paradox of reading as an experience both private and public. It uses internal reader experience as a starting point for exploration, evoking the concept of a readerly sense of presence as a selection…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

While previous research has provided insights into vocabulary learning through extensive reading, the differential effects of word frequency and word class on active form and passive meaning word recognition remain less understood. By evaluating learners' post-test performance in active form recognition and passive meaning recognition, this study…

A substantial amount of research has focused on children's reading development and reading problems, but in comparison there has been relatively little research into children's reading comprehension. This article provides an overview of the research that has investigated the skills and cognitive processes that support children's understanding of…

To learn to read, the brain must repurpose neural systems for oral language and visual processing to mediate written language. We begin with a description of computational models for how alphabetic written language is processed. Next, we explain the roles of a dorsal sublexical system in the brain that relates print and speech, a ventral lexical…

To build a coherent accurate mental representation of a text, readers routinely validate information they read against the preceding text and their background knowledge. It is clear that both sources affect processing, but "when" and "how" they exert their influence remains unclear. To examine the time course and cognitive…

A fundamental question in reading research concerns whether attention is allocated strictly serially, supporting lexical processing of one word at a time, or in parallel, supporting concurrent lexical processing of two or more words (Reichle, Liversedge, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2009). The origins of this debate are reviewed. We then report three…

Three ERP experiments examined the effect of word presentation rate (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA) on the time course of word frequency and predictability effects in sentence reading. In Experiments 1 and 2, sentences were presented word-by-word in the screen center at an SOA of 700 and 490ms, respectively. While these rates are typical…

The present set of 7 experiments systematically examined the effectiveness of adding causal explanations to simple refutations in reducing or eliminating the impact of outdated information on subsequent comprehension. The addition of a single causal-explanation sentence to a refutation was sufficient to eliminate any measurable disruption in…

Split fovea theory proposes that when the eyes are fixated within a written word, visual information about the letters falling to the left of fixation is projected initially to the right cerebral hemisphere while visual information about the letters falling to the right of fixation is projected to the left cerebral hemisphere. The two parts of the…

Based on recent progress in theory and measurement techniques, the analysis of eye movements has become one of the major methodological tools in experimental reading research. Our work uses this approach to advance the understanding of impaired information processing in acquired central dyslexia of stroke patients with aphasia. Up to now there has…

As the ongoing national indicator of what American students know and can do, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading regularly collects achievement information on representative samples of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Through The Nation's Report Card, the NAEP Reading Assessment reports how well students perform in…

During the 1970s, schema theory gained prominence as reading researchers took up early work by cognitive scientists to explore the role of schemas in reading. In the 1980s and '90s, the field shifted as researchers increasingly used sociocultural theories, particularly the work of L. S. Vygotsky, to frame investigations of literacy. This article…

The articles in this section describe research on reading in areas of visual persistence, letter identification, letter probability, word superiority effect, proofreader errors and order effects. This review challenges fellow basic researchers to become more aware of the components of reading before adding new data purporting to delineate the…