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,"…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the units of word perception used by adults and children reading on different levels of reading maturity. The purpose of the investigations was to determine whether whole words, single letters, or spelling patterns operate in the recognition of isolated words. Both experiments used a same-different…

While studies of college-level readers have yielded evidence both for and against the use of phonological or speech recoding in the recognition of written words, no consistent picture of when recoding occurs has yet emerged. However, one model, the adjunct access model, can account for the previous research findings. According to this model,…

Reports the findings of experiments that suggest that much of perception, even to high interpretive levels, is automatic and independent of intention or consciousness, and that the production of words in reading may involve problems that have nothing to do with articulation, even if the words have been identified. (GT)

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…

Results from studies of language identification in noise and of word identification from tachistoscopic presentation clearly indicate that contextual information can be used to facilitate word identification under inadequate stimulus conditions. But these results do not provide strong evidence that such an interaction is occurring during normal…

This paper reports initial results in the development of an inventory to measure visual reading difficulties. The instrument, called the Word Preference Inventory (WPI), asks the subject to choose between pairs of stimulus pseudo-words the one most like a given target word. An analysis of responses to the WPI from 922 children in grades K-6 and…

A STUDY OF KINDERGARTEN PERCEPTION WAS MADE TO DETERMINE IF A FORMAL PROGRAM IN PERCEPTION IN KINDERGARTEN WOULD CONTRIBUTE TO THE GROWTH OF PERCEPTION IN CHILDREN AT THE END OF THE KINDERGARTEN YEAR AND TO SUCCESS AT THE FIRST-GRADE LEVEL. FOURTEEN KINDERGARTEN CLASSES WERE CHOSEN AT RANDOM FOR A CONTROL GROUP, AND 14 CLASSES WERE CHOSEN AT…

Presents results of an investigation of visual cues which lead to word and letter recognition. (SL)

Presents computational and psychophysical evidence in support of a theory of one of the earliest stages of visual processing in reading--the isolation of words in text. (HOD)

This report is the first in a two-part series introducing an interactive activation model of context effects in perception. A model for the perception of letters in words and other contexts is described and applied to a number of experiments. It is proposed that the model accounts for (1) the perceptual advantage for letters in words compared to…

This report is the second in a two-part series introducing an interactive activation model of context effects in perception. In the first part, a model for the perception of letters in words and other contexts was described and applied to a number of experiments. This second part applies the same model to a number of new experiments designed to…

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…