Reading is a process that bridges the distinction between perceptual and cognitive processes but the formalisms of the information processing approach to the study of reading apply most naturally either to models assuming a series of noninteracting stages of information processing or to a set of independent parallel processing units. This paper…

Four experiments examined the "distinctiveness of encoding" hypothesis with respect to recall of text materials. Specifically, they investigated: (1) recall of distinctively versus nondistinctively encoded material; (2) readers' interactions with the semantic base of the text; (3) encoding and recall of semantic content; and (4) the role…

Ten college-aged dyslexic students performed significantly poorer than 10 controls on 2 measures of phonemic awareness: reading of nonsense words, and a phoneme reversal task. Results suggest that, although the dyslexic subjects had improved their reading skills, a deficit remained in their ability to process phonological information quickly and…

In a study designed to investigate whether the meaning of printed words is perceived directly in rapid silent reading or by means of phonetic recoding, subjects named pictures on which words or nonwords were superimposed as distractors. In a Stroop task of this kind, distractor words that are not congruent with the names of the pictures on which…

Experiments with 81 college students and 48 fifth graders investigated the role of one form of intra-word orthographic redundancy--the characteristic asymmetric spatial distributions of letters of the alphabet across serial positions within words. Adults were sensitive to letter positional distributions, as were fifth graders who were good…

Two experiments examined proofreading errors to test whether reading is mediated by a phonological recoding stage. In the first experiment, 162 undergraduates circled the misspelled words in a text as the experimenter read the passage aloud. In the second experiment, 165 undergraduates corrected misspellings as they read the same passage silently,…

Summarizes good reading research published in journals during 1986, focusing on studies that deal with reading comprehension, prior learning, and word recognition. (SRT)

This paper describes a methodological approach to the reading processes, involving the use of measures of speed of response or reaction time (RT) obtained from subjects while performing reading related tasks. Following a review of the literature on measures of RT, two experiments currently being done at the University of Minnesota are described…

Examines whether the comprehension of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students who were trained to summarize improved more than that of students who responded to short-answer questions. Finds that since the reading comprehension of all classes improved significantly, the study could not prove that either approach was the major cause of this…

This book, intended for researchers in the psychology of reading and language, college students in psychology and education, teachers of reading, and educators in general, is designed to be used in a course on the psychology of reading or the psychology of language comprehension. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "An Introduction and…

Recognizing a word in a meaningful text involves processes that combine information from many different sources, and both bottom-up processes (such as feature extraction and letter recognition) and top-down processes (contextual information) are thought to interact when skilled readers recognize words. Two similar experiments investigated word…

Two experiments examined developmental trends in children's lexical decisions for abstract and concrete words. The first experiment examined children's on-line comprehension of abstract and concrete words. Subjects were 15 second or third graders and 15 college adults at the University of Georgia. The second experiment provided a stronger test of…

A study evaluated the phonics performance of skilled adult readers using the D. Durkin phonics test, which was also used in 1984 to measure the phonics ability of children. The test, which was given to 25 college juniors and seniors, consisted of 29 regularly spelled pseudo or nonsense words to be pronounced aloud by the subjects. Results…

To test three specific hypotheses about recall as a function of four categories of logical relations, a study was done to determine whether logical relations systems of prose analysis can be used to predict recall. Two descriptive passages of naturally occurring expository prose were used. Each text was parsed into 45 statements, consisting of…

A study was conducted to identify strategies used by successful readers in comprehending and interpreting various kinds of texts. Seventy-three graduate students were asked to keep a journal (unedited and freely written) of what they were thinking as they were reading Umberto Eco's novel "The Name of the Rose." Selected journal entries…