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Understanding Reading Processes
--From letter features to sentence
Introduction
Reading may be defined in the most general terms as the extraction of meaning from print, though already at this point the objection may be raised that readers do not so much extract meaning from print, but rather engage in an active construction of meaning based on the signs provided by the print. The impossibility of providing a more precise definition is apparent when considering that reading encompasses processes as different from one another as understanding a STOP sign, studying a complex textbook, and reading a long novel for pleasure. ...
The complexity of reading is partly caused by the fact that reading, apart from using the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms involved in any receptive skill (e. ... The complexity of reading is further manifest in the ability of readers to handle both print and handwriting, though understanding of how the latter is processed is extremely partial.
The degree of automaticity in reading is not completely clear. ...
Physical Basis of Reading
The most important point about the physical process of reading is that eye movements in short leaps, known as ¡®saccades,¡¯ typically lasting approximately 20-35 msec and spanning 7-9 characters. ... The importance of parafoveal information has been demonstrated in eye movement studies showing that when fewer than 14 characters to the right and four characters to the left of the point of fixation are visible to the reader, reading is impaired. ...
Models of Reading
With a research history dating from the late 1960s, three major types of reading models have been advanced, which concern what actually happens from the moment the reader first sets eyes on the line of print. ... Later in the early 1970s came the ¡®top-town revolution¡¯, claiming reading to be a ¡®psychological guessing game¡¯. ... Aptly presented under the title ¡®One Second of Reading,¡¯ it begins with the visual input of a single fixation, during which purely visual information about letter features is taken in, creating an ¡®iconic image¡¯ on the retina. ... What top-down models stress, however, is the active contribution of the reader to the lower-level processes; beginning with intake of visual information and going on to decoding. ... The stress is on reading efficiency, minimizing the reader¡¯s dependence on visual elements and maximizing dependence on meaning cues: the memorable phrase used by Goodman to describe reading is ¡®a psycholinguistic guessing game.¡¯ Goodman¡¯s model may serve as a suitable contrast to Gough¡¯s: it sees the reader as engaged in a tripartite ongoing process of ¡®predicting,¡¯ ¡®confirmation,¡¯ and ¡®correction,¡¯ preceded by recognition-initiation and followed by terminating of reading. ... Recent models of reading therefore, present the reading process as a constant interaction between top-down and bottom-up processes. ... They also often take account of the attentional limitations of the human mind, and make use of the notion of automatic versus controlled processing, hypothesizing that certain elements of reading are automatized, so that attentional capacity can be devoted to higher-level operations.
Word Recognition and lexical access
¡®Word recognition¡¯ is the product of a set of processes charged with the task of rendering a belief about what word was just seen. This set of processes is required:
i) to relate a word¡¯s visual input to a corresponding mental representation stored in memory;
ii) to check the accuracy of any match between memory and stimulus representations;
iii) to make the contents of the accessed memory representation, such as the word¡¯s form descriptions, its meaning(s) and its syntactic properties, available to higher level processors, where single words can be integrated into interpretable phrases and sentences; and where necessary;
iv) to resolve any discrepancy that may exist between the input and accessed representations, so that the product of recognition is the writer¡¯s intended form.
Approximate Word count = 2698
Approximate Pages = 10.8
(250 words per page double spaced)
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