For more than 100 years, research on the psychology of reading has proliferated. In this article, the authors wish to help modern reading researchers understand the origins of the discipline and benefit from its history. This article draws heavily on Edmund Burke Huey's 1908 landmark volume "The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading,"…

This study was based on the assumption that the average person should be able to grasp 14 words of pica type within the span of a half dollar. During the weekly Rapid Reading series, a cooperative venture of CBS-TV and the Northwestern University, a tachistoscopic challenge was presented to the audience. The training in rapid reading came through…

Four experiments investigated the phenomenon of letter migration, the tendency of readers to assign letters from one word to another appearing in close proximity. The experiments, which involved college undergraduate students, revealed several properties of letter migration, including the following: (1) migrations are more frequent when the words…

Research methodology on reading improvement should focus on the processing of stimuli and experience of content rather than on simple models of reading using eye movement, silent speech, perceptual span, reading ability and visual ability as explanatory concepts. (MKM)

Concludes that further research into the imagery-comprehension relationship in reading is necessary. (RB)

A study investigated at what point during eye fixations visual information is used in furthering the reading process. The study identified two aspects of information processing: registration, in which a light pattern on the retina triggers a pattern of neural activity in the visula cortex; and utilization, in which the registered pattern has an…

The theoretical orientation based on perceptual development, proposed by Piaget in 1961, is the starting point of this investigation. According to Piaget, the perception of the young child is "centered" on dominant aspects of the field. With maturity, perception becomes "decentered" and progressively freed from the field. The…

The importance of content-relevant pictures in the comprehension of the main idea of a paragraph was investigated. Various reading conditions were constructed which contained a paragraph, a picture, or both, each with three types of instructions. In addition, the effects of paragraph readability, student grade placement (grade 3 and 6), and sex…

Assesses the effects of different learning conditions on perceptual span development. Notes the superiority of the contingency-plus-attention group in the training situation but the better transfer of the attention-only group to a standard reading situation. Graphs and bibliography. (RW)

Concludes that J. Piaget's cognitive developmental theory may be used as a framework to understand reading in all children, while visual perception showed no relationship to any measure of reading. (FL)

A computer-based Eye-Movement Controlled Display System was developed for the study of perceptual processes in reading. Studies were conducted to identify the region from which skilled readers pick up various types of visual information during a fixation while reading. The results indicated that the subjects acquired word length pattern…

The predictive validity of the constructs underlying the Marianne Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception (DTVP) was investigated in this study. The hypotheses tested were concerned with the usefulness of the DTVP in predicting particular academic skills. The DTVP was administered individually by nine regular classroom teachers to 33…

Good and poor student readers and adults read texts in normal format and with 13 spaces between words. Wide spacing improved comprehension for poor readers but did not affect their reading efficiency, while it substantially impaired the efficiency of the other groups. Text difficulty did not interact significantly with spacing. (SJL)