Mind wandering occurs when a reader's thoughts are unrelated to the text's ideas. We examined the relation between mind wandering and readers' memory for text. More specifically, we assessed whether mind wandering inhibits the reader's development of the situation model and thus their ability to identify and recall the text's most central ideas.…

Discrimination of reversible mirrored letters (e.g., d and b) poses a challenge when learning to read as it requires overcoming "mirror invariance," an evolutionary-old perceptual tendency of processing mirror images as equivalent. The present study investigated "when," in reading development, mirror-image discrimination…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

Automaticity, or instant recognition of combinations of letters as units of language, is essential for proficient reading in any language. The article explores automaticity amongst competent adult first-language readers of isiZulu, and the factors associated with it or its opposite - active decoding. Whilst the transparent spelling patterns of…

The goal of the study was to examine the association between visual-attentional span and lexical decision in skilled adult readers. In the span tasks, an array of letters was presented briefly and recognition or production of a single cued letter (partial span) or production of all letters (whole span) was required. Independently of letter…

A commonly shared assumption in the field of visual-word recognition is that retinotopic representations are rapidly converted into abstract representations. Here we examine the role of visual form vs. abstract representations during the early stages of word processing--as measured by masked priming--in young children (3rd and 6th Graders) and…

Oral reading speeds for letters, words out of context, and simple text and reading achievement were measured in samples of children and adults. Results are used to discuss the nature and development of a general identification speed variable and an orthographic structure variable. (AA)

Phonological and metaphonological skills are explored in 97 Brazilian illiterate and semiliterate adults. A simple letter- and word-reading task was used to define the degree of illiteracy. Phonemic awareness was strongly dependent on the level of letter and word reading ability. Phonological memory was very low in illiterates and unrelated to…

Hypotheses about the processes involved in word recognition are reviewed and assessed through four experiments. Overall results were compatible with criterion bias models. A version of this model attributes the advantage of words (over pseudowords and nonwords) to interfacilitation among single letter and lexical units in memory. (Author/RD)

Both fourth-grade children and adult Ss searched faster for target letters through common words than nonwords (scrambled collections of letters), through third-order pseudowords than nonwords. (Editor)

Subjects instructed to circle misspellings while reading prose were less likely to detect misspellings in function than in content words. Misspellings that changed the shape of a word were more likely to be detected. It is not clear whether differences between function and content words are due to familiarity or redundancy. (Author/RD)

In this paper, we argue that a complete understanding of language processing, in this case word-recognition processes, requires consideration both of multiple languages and of developmental processes. To illustrate these goals, we will summarize a 10-year research program exploring word-recognition processes in Korean adults and children. We…

Three experiments examine the information extraction process in adults and elementary school children reading paragraphs or words. In experiments 1 and 2 subjects were presented paragraphs to read and to search for specified targets. In experiment 3 subjects were asked to judge whether briefly presented pairs of letters were the same or different.…