ED 6 Theories of Reading

By: Myla B. Coretz

Brief History
Psychological research on reading was done

in the early 1900s by E. B. Huey and others

According to Huey (1908): . . .to completely

analyze what we do when we read would almost be the acme of a psychologists achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind . . . .

 With the rise of Behaviorism in the early part

of the last century, especially within American psychology, the focus shifted to studying behaviors that were more observable than reading (more simple learning and more simple learners) As cognitive psychology became increasingly dominant during the latter half of the century, reading (and human thinking in general) again became a phenomenon to study

How might we think about reading?

Perhaps because of

lasting effects of Behaviorism, many early models of reading still had a very stimulus-driven, or text-driven feel In these early models, the assumption was that information in the text is taken in by the reader Information was seen to flow from the bottom up

An Early Bottom-Up Model of Reading, LaBerge & Samuels (1972)

Letters are perceived as

visual patterns, and with learning, come to be recognized as letters Letters are mentally P+A+T PAT combined and recognized as words Words are successively PAT THE DOG ON recognized as phrases, THE HEAD. sentences, etc.

Not the whole story

To test such a text-driven model, you can

now be a subject in an experiment that Edmund Burke Huey performed 100 years ago (with slightly different technology) When you click the mouse or spacebar, you will see an asterisk ( * ) appear on the screen to orient you. A vertical list of items (letters or words) will then appear under the asterisk See how many of the items you can read in the time you are given (if possible, read out loud, in a rapid but comfortable pace)

*
y w u s q o m k i g e c

Did you finish the whole list?

Did you have time left over?
Click when you are ready to start the next list.

*
pool rugs mark send list more pick stab neck your dice font

Did you finish the whole list?

Did you have time left over? Click when you are ready to start the next list.

*
analysis habitual occupied inherent probable summoned devotion remarked overcome resolute elements conclude

Did you finish the whole list?

If you are like most adult readers, you had

time to read all the items on all the lists

Click to advance each screen again

What does this demonstrate?

We do not read letter by letter, building up

words from individual letters The lists contained successively more letters

List 1: 1 letter per line List 2: 4 letters per line List 3: 8 letters per line

However, the lists were not displayed for

proportionately longer times

All lists were displayed for 8 seconds

You just replicated classic findings

You read the short words (4 letter words in

List 2) just as quickly as you read single letters (List 1); both were displayed for only 8 seconds Even though List 3 contained eight times more letters than List 1, you did not need eight times longer to read it In studies with more precise timing, people even read short words more quickly than single letters, a phenomenon that has come to be called the word superiority effect

Alternative models of reading

Theoretical models

emphasizing the expectations and prediction abilities of readers have come to be known as top-down models