Psychology of Reading

2nd Edition

Keith Rayner, Alexander Pollatsek, Jane Ashby, Charles Clifton Jr.

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136579677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Reading is a highly complex skill that is prerequisite to success in many societies in which a great deal of information is communicated in written form. Since the 1970s, much has been learned about the reading process from research by cognitive psychologists. This book summarizes that important work and puts it into a coherent framework.

The book's central theme is how readers go about extracting information from the printed page and comprehending the text. Like its predecessor, this thoroughly updated 2nd Edition encompasses all aspects of the psychology of reading with chapters on writing systems, word recognition, the work of the eyes during reading, inner speech, sentence processing, discourse processing, learning to read, dyslexia, individual differences and speed reading.

Psychology of Reading, 2nd Edition, is essential reading for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in cognitive psychology and could be used as a core textbook on courses on the psychology of reading and related topics. In addition, the clear writing style makes the book accessible to people without a background in psychology but who have a personal or professional interest in the process of reading.

Part I

Background Information

In the first three chapters of this book we present some information that will be necessary for you to understand many of the points we will stress in later chapters. In Chapter 1 some key concepts from cognitive psychology are introduced that will be used throughout the book. Cognitive psychology is the branch of experimental psychology that is concerned with how the mind functions and is structured, and in the past 40 years many cognitive psychologists have been very interested in studying how the mind works during reading. In Chapter 1 we introduce many of the basic conceptual tools that cognitive psychologists use when they study mental processes in general, and reading in particular.

Chapter 2 gives an overview of different writing systems that have been used or are in use throughout the world. As in Chapter 1, we also use Chapter 2 to introduce some key concepts from linguistics and psychology. Since the rest of the book will be dealing with the processes that result when readers attempt to decipher the marks on the page, it is essential we have some knowledge of the nature of the stimulus that is the starting point for all those processes. In addition, it is important to discuss the central characteristics of different writing systems, partly to gain some insight into written English and partly because people have misconceptions about many writing systems.

Note that we used the term processes a few times in the preceding sentences. This book is primarily about how the mind processes information during reading—we will have virtually nothing to say about motivational and emotional issues during reading. Our focus in this book is on the reading process when it is going well: for skilled readers who are motivated to read, either intrinsically or extrinsically. We assume that such skilled and motivated reading characterizes much of reading and, as you will see, it is enough of a challenge to explain it. However, beginning reading and certain kinds of reading disabilities will be the focus of Part IV.

Chapter 3 is one of the most important chapters in the book because there we first discuss how words are identified. In this chapter we describe some of the work cognitive psychologists have done to understand how isolated words are perceived, recognized, and understood. Some researchers are critical of this work, and suggest that identifying words in isolation is quite different from normal fluent reading. The position that we adopt (and which we will justify at various points throughout the book) is that skilled reading involves a number of component processes, and these component processes can be studied. That is not to say we believe that reading is merely identifying individual words and stringing the meaning of the words together; the process of comprehending text is much more complex than that. However, a moment’s reflection should make it clear that, for reading to proceed at all efficiently, we must be able to recognize and understand the meaning of most (if not all) of the individual words that we encounter. In later sections of this book we explore the processes of recognizing words and understanding sentences in normal reading. The background information we present in this first section of this book will help you understand the complex information-processing activities that occur when you read and understand text.

1

Introduction and Preliminary Information

Reading is a complex skill that is pretty much taken for granted by those who can do it. About 35 years ago (when cognitive psychologists first became interested in studying reading) one of the authors, then a graduate student, got into an elevator in the Engineering Department at a famous university in the northeastern part of the United States with a copy of Smith’s book Understanding Reading (1971) under his arm. A bright young freshman engineering student, upon seeing the book, was quick to remark: “Oh, reading; I learned how to do that 15 years ago.” That remark is pretty consistent with most people’s attitudes about reading. Those who can do it take it for granted. Yet it is an extremely complicated process that is sometimes difficult to learn (particularly in comparison to the ease with which children learn to speak). And illiterate adults find attempts to learn to read agonizingly frustrating.

Anyone reading this book is likely to be familiar with 30,000 or more words and can generally recognize most of them within a fraction of a second. A skilled reader can do this despite the fact that letters that make up the words are often printed in different type fonts. In the case of handwritten letters a reader can still read and comprehend despite rather dramatic differences in style and legibility. In being able to read and identify words in spite of all this variability, a skilled reader is able to perform a feat that is well beyond the capability of the most powerful computer programs available today. But this is not all. Skilled readers can identify words that have different meanings in different contexts. Consider the use of the word boxer in the following two sentences:

John knew the boxer was angry when he started barking at him.

(1.1)

John knew the boxer was angry when he started yelling at him.

(1.2)

These two sentences are identical except for a single word which disambiguates the appropriate meaning of the word boxer. The most common meaning for boxer is a dog. Since dogs bark and people don’t, boxer in sentence 1.1 clearly refers to a dog. Likewise, in sentence 1.2 the fact that the boxer is yelling leads us to believe that the sentence is referring to a person. If you are very observant, you may have noticed that there are actually two ambiguities in sentences 1.1 and 1.2. Not only is the word boxer ambiguous, the pronoun he is also ambiguous. Most of the time, in sentences like 1.1 and 1.2, we associate the pronoun with the most recent antecedent. But if the sentence read

The boxer scared John when he started yelling at him.

(1.3)

we would most likely associate the pronoun with John.Yet notice even here that it is not completely clear who he is. If we replace the word scared with the word attacked we would probably understand the sentence quite differently.

The point of this discussion is that we can easily understand the meaning of these different sentences despite the fact that individual words have more than one meaning and pronouns can refer to more than one referent. Coupled with this fact is the observation that we can easily understand puns, idioms, and metaphors. For example:

John thought the billboard was a wart on the landscape.

(1.4)

Here none of us would believe that the literal meaning of the word wart was intended. We quite easily understand the sentence to mean that the billboard was ugly and spoiled the scene. And, just as we can easily comprehend the metaphor in sentence 1.4, so the idiomatic nature of

John hit the nail on the head with his answer.

(1.5)

presents a difficulty only for non-native readers of English who attempt a literal interpretation of the sentence and find it nonsensical. Thus, skilled readers are very good at combining the meanings of individual words to derive the meaning of sentences and paragraphs and short passages and books. Readers can draw inferences by relying on what they already know to help understand text, and from reading words they can form images of scenes and appreciate poetry.

We have been arguing that the feats of a skilled reader are truly impressive. Very powerful computers cannot do what a skilled reader can do; such machines (or more specifically the programs that run on them), despite tremendous memory capacity, would fail on many of the tasks we have mentioned that a skilled reader handles almost effortlessly. How do skilled readers accomplish this complex task? And how is the skill acquired? These are the central questions of this book. For the most part we will focus on the skilled reader in attempting to explain the process of reading. Our primary rationale is that we must understand the skill itself before we can understand how it is acquired, and our primary orientation in this book is a cognitive psychology/information-processing point of view (i.e., understanding the component mechanisms underlying reading). In the remainder of this chapter we attempt to place the rest of the book into perspective. We will do this by first discussing how researchers have historically viewed reading. Then we will present an overview of the human information-processing system, discussing what types of processing mechanisms may be involved in reading. First, however, we briefly discuss our perspective of reading—that of a cognitive psychologist.

What is Cognitive Psychology?

Cognitive psychology is the branch of experimental psychology that studies how the mind works. Cognitive psychologists are interested in a wide range of mental activities from attention to memory to language to learning concepts to decision making. Within the cognitive psychologist’s toolbox there are a number of tools that are used to try and investigate the topic of interest. Foremost among these tools are what are now generally referred to as behavioral experiments; this term is usually used in contrast to brain-imaging studies. In behavioral experiments people (referred to as participants) are asked to perform some kind of task. The amount of time that it takes them to complete the task (or respond to a stimulus), and the response they actually make (and its accuracy), are typically measured. We will discuss various types of response time tasks relevant for reading in Chapter 3, but at this point we only want to alert you to the general technique. In brain-imaging studies, which have become very popular in the last 20 years or so, participants are asked to perform some type of task while correlates of neural activity in their brains are measured. The third main tool used by cognitive psychologists is that of producing computer simulations of the issue of interest. As we will see, a number of models or computer simulations that are relevant to understanding reading have appeared within the last few years.

We will extensively discuss behavioral techniques and the results of computational modeling throughout the book, but will briefly introduce brain-imaging techniques here (for a good overview, see Dehaene, 2009). Currently, two general types of measurement of brain activity are employed. Two of these techniques, positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are good at localizing where in the brain certain activities occur, but their temporal resolution is not very precise. They both measure the hemodynamic response, the increase in blood flow to active neurons in the brain. This response occurs over an approximate span of 6 seconds, varying across individuals. As we will see later, many of the important processes involved in reading occur within 250 milliseconds (or one quarter of a second), well beyond the temporal resolution of fMRI and other blood-flow-based brain-imaging techniques. Still, such studies have contributed valuable information about the location of the neural circuits involved in reading and are beginning to examine the neural bases of reading disorders, such as dyslexia (see Frost et al., 2009, for a review). Other neurophysiological measures have a millisecond temporal resolution fine enough for studying reading processes. Electroencephalography (EEG) measures changes in electrical potentials at the scalp that result when large networks of neurons prepare to fire in response to a stimulus. These event-related potentials (ERPs) reflect brain activity from the start of a task (e.g., word recognition), providing a continuous, online measure of the time course of cognitive processes as they unfold. Arguably the most complex brain-imaging technology is magnetoencephalography (MEG), which measures the magnetic consequences of electrical activity in the brain to offer not only fine-grained temporal resolution, but also high spatial resolution, which enables the localization of neural activity to particular areas in the brain. MEG studies have contributed novel findings about the location and time course of brain activity during word reading (see Halderman, Ashby, & Perfetti, in press, for a review). However, the highly sophisticated data acquisition and modeling techniques that MEG requires necessarily limit its use. As informative as these methods are, most of what is known about the complex processes involved in reading has been discovered in carefully controlled behavioral experiments. Thus, most of the research we discuss in this book is behavioral research.

Historical Overview of Reading Research

The roots of cognitive psychology can be traced to the establishment of Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. Workers in Wundt’s laboratory were keenly interested in questions related to memory, perception, and action. Shortly thereafter there was considerable interest in the process of reading, which reached its apex with the publication of Huey’s (1908) The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. A perusal of the chapters in the first part of his book (the part dealing with the psychology of reading) will reveal that the chapters bear a remarkable similarity to the topics covered in the present volume and most other modern books dealing with the psychology of reading. Huey and his contemporaries were interested in eye movements in reading, the nature of the perceptual span (how much information can be perceived during a fixation of the eye), word recognition processes, inner speech, reading comprehension, and reading rate. Huey’s marvelously cogent and concise description of his findings and those of his contemporaries prior to 1908 is still a joy to read. Many of the basic facts we know about eye movements during reading were discovered by Huey and contemporaries using cumbersome and seemingly archaic techniques in comparison to the sophisticated devices currently available to record eye movements during reading. Yet their discoveries have stood the test of time and have held up when replicated using more accurate recording systems. A contemporary of Huey, the French oculist, Emile Javal, first noted that during reading our eyes do not move smoothly across the page as our phenomenological impressions would imply. Rather our eyes make a series of jumps (or saccades in French) along the line. Between the jumps the eyes remain relatively still, for about a quarter of a second, in what is referred to as a fixation.

In order to study how much information can be perceived in a single eye fixation, the tachistoscope was devised. The t-scope (as it is often called) is a device that allows an experimenter to control how much information is presented to a participant, as well as the duration of the exposure. The t-scope is now largely a historical relic, as it has been supplanted by high-speed computers with millisecond control. However, by varying the amount of information available in the t-scope and by presenting it for a brief duration (to preclude any eye movement), early researchers hoped to infer the size of the perceptual span or the area of effective vision during a fixation. Huey’s book also describes classic experiments by Cattell (1886) and by Erdmann and Dodge (1898) on word recognition and two full chapters in the book are devoted to the role of inner speech in reading. Huey’s lucid observations on inner speech and word recognition processes have largely stood the test of time.

Work related to the cognitive processes involved in reading continued for a few years after the publication of Huey’s book. However, serious work by psychologists on the reading process pretty much came to a halt a few years after 1913. In that year the behaviorist revolution in experimental psychology began. According to behaviorist doctrine, the only things worthy of study by experimental psychologists were activities that could be seen, observed, and measured. Since cognitive processes involved in skilled reading cannot be observed and directly measured, interest in reading waned. To be sure, some well-known investigations of eye movements during reading by Buswell and Tinker were carried out between 1920 and 1960, but for the most part their work dealt with purely peripheral components of reading. That is, eye movements can be seen and directly measured, and were by Buswell and Tinker, but attempts to relate the activity of the eye to activity of the mind were virtually non-existent.

In essence, work on the cognitive processes associated with reading came to a standstill in the 1920s and did not begin again until the 1960s. Small wonder then that when Huey’s book was republished in 1968 it seemed so relevant! We hadn’t learned a whole lot more about the cognitive processes involved in reading in the 60 years between the initial publication of the work and the second appearance of the book. In addition to the work on eye movements during reading by researchers such as Buswell and Tinker, some work on reading did continue during the interval in question. But most of this work was conducted in Schools of Education where the primary focus is generally on more applied aspects of reading. Thus there was work on the most appropriate method to teach reading, and many of the standardized reading tests still in existence today were developed during that period. However, work on the mental processes associated with reading was almost non...