The Psychology of Reading

Keith Rayner, Alexander Pollatsek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136601774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The last 20 years have witnessed a revolution in reading research. Cognitive psychologists, using high-speed computers to aid in the collection and analysis of data, have developed tools that have begun to answer questions that were previously thought unanswerable. These tools allow for a "chronometric, " or moment-to-moment, analysis of the reading process. Foremost among them is the use of the record of eye movements to help reveal the underlying perceptual and cognitive processes of reading. This volume provides a coherent framework for the research accomplished on the reading process over the past 15 years. It emphasizes how readers go about extracting information from the printed page and how they comprehend the text.

PART ONE
BACKGROUND INFORMATION

In the first three chapters of this book, we will present some information that will be necessary for you to understand many of the points that we will stress in later chapters. In Chapter 1, some key concepts from cognitive psychology will be introduced that will be used throughout the book. Cognitive psychology is the branch of experimental psychology that studies how the mind functions and is structured, and in the past 20 years many cognitive psychologists have been studying how the mind works during reading. In Chapter 1, we will introduce many of the basic conceptual tools that cognitive psychologists use when they study mental processes in general and reading in particular.

In Chapter 2, an overview of the different writing systems that have been used or are in use throughout the world will be presented. As in Chapter 1, we will 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 black marks on the page, it is essential that we have some knowledge of the stimulus that is the starting point for all those processes. In addition, it is important to discuss the significant characteristics of different writing systems—partly to gain some insight into written English and partly to clear up 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 the book will be on the reading process for skilled readers who are motivated to read. We assume that such skilled and motivated reading characterizes much of reading, and as you shall 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 4.

Chapter 3 is one of the most important chapters in the book because there we will discuss how words are identified. In that chapter, we will 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 we adopt (and will justify at various points in the book) is that skilled reading involves a number of component processes, and that 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—the individual words we encounter.

The first section of the book thus will primarily provide you with the background information necessary to understand the process of reading. In the subsequent sections, this background information will be used to help you understand the complex information-processing activities that occur when you read and understand text.

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION AND PRELIMINARY INFORMATION

Reading is a complex skill that is pretty much taken for granted by those who can do it. In the early-seventies (when cognitive psychologists became very 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 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. While those who can do it fluently take it for granted, its complexity is more apparent to those who are having trouble. Reading is sometimes difficult for children to learn (particularly in comparison to the ease with which they learn to speak), and illiterate adults find learning 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 the letters which make up the words are often printed in different typefonts. 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 makes clear the appropriate meaning of the word boxer. The less common meaning for boxer is a dog. Since dogs bark and people don’t, however, 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 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 but also the pronoun he. In 1.1, he would be interpreted as the boxer because of barking but in 1.2, he could either be John or the boxer. There is some bias, however, in sentences like 1.1 and 1.2 to associate the pronoun with the most recent antecedent. Other factors can change the bias; in 1.3, he is most likely John but in 1.4, he is most likely the boxer.

The boxer hit John because he started yelling at him. (1.3)

The boxer hit John and then he started yelling at him. (1.4)

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 occasionally have unclear antecedents. Coupled with this fact is the observation that we can easily understand puns, idioms, and metaphors. For example, in sentence 1.5

John thought the billboard was a wart on the landscape. (1.5)

none of us would believe 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. Just as we can easily comprehend the metaphor in sentence 1.5, the idiomatic nature of sentence 1.6

John hit the nail on the head with his answer.(1.6)

presents a difficulty only for nonnative 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, as well as short passages and books. Readers can draw inferences by relying upon 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, despite tremendous memory capacity, cannot do what a skilled reader can do; such machines (or more specifically the programs that run them), 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 will 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.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF READING RESEARCH

The roots of cognitive psychology, the branch of experimental psychology that studies how the mind works, 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 and to language processing. 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 (that 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 contemporary 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, Emile Javal, the French oculist, 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. A large number of experiments were carried out by Huey and his contemporaries to understand the work of the eyes in reading.

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 subject, as well as the duration of the exposure. By varying the amount of information available in the t-scope and by presenting it for a duration brief enough 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 observations on inner speech and word-recognition processes are lucid, and amazingly relevant to current issues.

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 between 1920 and 1960. While Bus well and Tinker carried out some well-known investigations of eye movements during reading, their work, for the most part, dealt with purely peripheral components of reading. Attempts to relate the activity of the eye to the activity of the mind were virtually nonexistent.

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 that when Huey’s book was republished in 1968 it seemed so relevant. Not much had been learned about reading in the 60 years between the initial publication of the work and its second appearance. We hasten to point out that 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 it was conducted in education schools 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 nonexistent.

Today, we find many psychologists interested in reading. Why has this change taken place? The primary reason appears to have been the failure of behaviorism to account for language processing in any reasonable way. The promise of behaviorism was always that if psychologists could understand the laws of learning and behavior in simple tasks (like knee jerks and eye blinks), those laws could be generalized to more complex tasks like language processing. In 1957, B. F. Skinner decided it was high time that the behaviorists produced on this promise, and he published Verbal Behavior which was an account of language from a behaviorist viewpoint. The linguist Noam Chomsky (1959) wrote a scathing review not only of the book but of behaviorism in general.

In essence, Chomsky argued that behaviorist principles could not account for language learning or language processes in general. Around that same time, he also published Syntactic Structures (1957), which was a radical departure from traditional linguistic theory. In that work, he suggested that the study of language and the mind are intimately related and presented an elegant theory of grammar. Many psychologists, disillusioned with behaviorism, became very interested in Chomsky’s theories of language processing. After a hiatus of more than 40 years, work on cognitive processes was underway. (There were a number of other factors that contributed to the reemergence of the study of cognitive processes around 1960, but they are beyond the scope of our current discussion.) Out of the burgeoning interest in language processes in general, interest in the reading process began once again around 1970. Since the mid-1960s a number of scholarly journals dealing with cognitive processes and human experimental psychology have been founded, and each issue of these journals generally contains at least one article related to reading. In addition, a number of textbooks dealing with reading have appeared in the last 5 or 6 years. Clearly, there is now considerable interest among cognitive psychologists in studying reading.

It is important to note that cognitive psychologists studying reading approach the issue from slightly different perspectives. Some have a background rooted in perception research and see the study of word recognition, for example, as a means to study perceptual processes or pattern recognition using well-defined stimuli. Others approach the study of reading with a background in memory processes and verbal learning theory. They tend to approach the study of reading by examining comprehension processes. Still others are interested in reading in and of itself, because they believe, as Huey pointed out 80 years ago, that to understand what the mind does during reading would be “the acme of a psychologist’s achievements, since it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One Background Information
• Part Two Skilled Reading of Text
• Part Three Understanding Text
• Part Four Beginning Reading and Reading Disability
• Part Five Toward A Model of Reading
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index