The present experiments, in conjunction with prior findings that good and poor readers differ in letter search time by their ability to use spatial redundancy, suggest that processes involved in the component skill of letter identification cannot be considered trivial to the reading process. (Editor)

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…