Reading and Understanding

This volume presents a review of current thinking about the psychology of reading, and is suitable as an advanced text for psychology, education and linguistics students. It introduces the nature of problems facing the reader who is to extract meaningful information from the printed symbols. A description of text and of the cognitive processes necessary for transforming visible characters into meanings is, therefore, the starting point. This introduces the notion of the "computational problem" facing the skilled reader: what kinds of information are available, and what are the processes necessary for recovering that information? Also necessary to consider is what is meant by the skill of reading: what cognitive changes occur as we become skilled readers, and how does word recognition and reading develop as we acquire this skill?
The chapters deal with: word recognition, reviewing cognitive models of lexical access, and the variations in recognition that need to be taken into account by any model of the internal lexicon; reading development, reviewing the component processes in reading skill and their development and use by readers of differing ability, including developmental dyslexics, poor readers, skilled readers and speed readers; cognitive neuropsychological processes, and specifically the acquired dyslexias and what they can tell us about normal reading processes; microprocesses, reviewing the role of eye movements in reading, theories of eye movement control, and the use of eye movement recordings as a tool to investigate on-line reading processes; and text comprehension, reviewing processes involved in the integration of words and propositions within sentences and the use of inference by skilled readers.