EDPSY 520:
Psychology of Reading
Virtual Overview and Introduction
Welcome
 This introduction is intended to provide a brief
history of the field and familiarize you with
major issues in the psychology of reading
 You will also have the opportunity to
participate in some classic experiments in the
study of reading processes
 Click your way through this presentation via
the mouse or spacebar; during some of the
experiments the computer may take control of
the screen pacing
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 psychologist’s
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.
A
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”
Conclusions
 Your reading times just demonstrated that not
all information flows from the text to the
reader; not all information flows from the
bottom up.
Alternative models of reading
 Theoretical models
emphasizing the
expectations and
prediction abilities of
readers have come to be
known as “top-down
models”
Top-down models
 Perhaps the purest of top-down models was
offered by Ken Goodman, based on his
analysis of readers’ errors as they read aloud,
which he called “miscues”
 Goodman noted that when they misread a
word, good readers are more likely than poor
readers to substitute a word that makes
sense in the sentence context
Examples of reading errors, or “miscues”
 When reading the sentence, “I walked up the
sidewalk, across the porch, and knocked on
the door of the house”
 Good readers may misread the word house
as home (but note how the sentence still
makes sense)
 Poor readers are more likely to misread the
word house as horse, or how, or even as a
nonsense word like “hoose” (rhyming with
choose)
Other evidence of top-down processing
 Semantic priming effects
 We read the word doctor more quickly
following the word nurse, chair more quickly
following the word table, compared to when
these words follow words with which they
share no meaningful relationship
Other evidence of top-down processing
 Prior knowledge effects
 When interpreting sentences containing
ambiguous words, such as “ When Jerry,
Mike, and Pat arrived, Karen was sitting in
her living room writing some notes”


College students majoring in music interpreted
the word notes as musical notes
Other students interpreted the words notes as
brief letters or reminders to oneself
Not the whole story either
 Of course, top-down processing can’t be the
whole story either because we do read, not
simply daydream in front of books
 The context that drives expectations comes
from somewhere
Interactive Models of Reading
 Most reading
researchers now adopt a
theoretical model that
includes interaction from
both top-down and
bottom-up processes
Implications of an Interactive Model
 Interactive models are not a simple
compromise, not a little of both
 Interactive reading processes require
complex coordination of multiple sources of
information




The text on the page
Context from previous text
Prior knowledge
Reading goals
Implications of an Interactive Model
 Where do we store all these sources of
information?
 How do we coordinate multiple information
sources, accessing them seemingly
simultaneously?
Unlimited Long-term Memory (LTM)
 Every kind of knowledge we use as part of
reading must be stored in our long-term
memory (LTM)






Letters
Words
Word meanings
Memory for general story structures
Memory for a specific text
Prior knowledge of the topic
Limited Short-term Memory (STM)
and Attention
 The amount of information we can hold in
immediate STM at any given time is limited
 The storage capacity of STM has been
estimated between 5 and 9 (7+2), but there
are strategies to increase STM
 Still, STM limits generally exist; to convince
yourself, try this multiplication problem in your
head:
1683945
x 6939
Implications of an Interactive Model
 During reading, attention can’t be everywhere
at once, even in an interactive system
 If attention is required to identify individual
letters, then less attention is available to
devote to recognizing words
 If attention is required to recognize words,
then less attention is available to devote to
building up story context
How do Interactions Work?
 The key to getting around limits on attention
and STM is to have some processes (such as
letter and word recognition) go on
automatically
 Automaticity is the underlying cause of the
word superiority effect you demonstrated for
yourself some while back
How do Automatic Processes Work?
 With the next few slides you can take part in
another classic reading experiment
 Click to begin
Name the color of each letter cluster
Read the following clusters from left to right, as
though you were reading connected
sentences. Remember to name the color of
the ink.
Click to begin
Name the color of each letter cluster
Name the color of each letter cluster
XXXXX XXXX XXX XXXXX XXXXX
XXX XXXX XXXX XXX XXXX
XXXX XXXXX XXX XXXX XXX
XXXXX XXX XXXXX XXXX XXX
Did you finish the whole set?
Did you have time left over?
Click when
you are ready
to start the
next set.
Name the color of each letter cluster
Read the following clusters from left to right, as
though you were reading connected
sentences. Remember to name the color of
the ink.
Click to begin
Name the color of each letter cluster
Name the color of each letter cluster
GREEN BLUE RED GREEN GREEN
RED BLUE BLUE RED BLUE
BLUE GREEN RED BLUE RED
GREEN RED GREEN BLUE RED
Did you finish the whole set?
 If you are like most adult readers, you named
the color of ink far more easily in the first set
than the second
 In the second list, you may have experienced
strong interference because you wanted to
say aloud the word that you saw, rather than
name the color of the ink in which the words
were printed
What does this demonstrate?
 Your word reading processes are automatic
 The good news: Automatic processes run
without conscious attention or effort
 The bad news: Automatic processes are also
hard to “turn off”
 You just replicated another classic study in
reading research, illustrating the “Stroop
effect” (named for the experimenter who first
reported it)
Implications for an Interactive Model
 If some of the multiple processes we are
trying to coordinate are automatic, they can
operate without tying up much attention or
STM capacity
 Thus, automatic lower level (bottom up)
process such as letter and word identification
can free up limited STM capacity for higher
level (top down) processes, such as
comprehension, interpretation, etc.
Reading Problems
 What are the most common sources of
reading problems?
 Are less skilled readers poorer at bottom up
processes such as word identification?
 Or, are less skilled readers necessarily poorer
at using context (as Goodman suggested)?
Another classic experiment in reading
 Perfetti & Roth examined the use of context
by skilled and less skilled readers in Grade 4
 Children listened to short stories and were
timed as they read aloud just the final word
 Thus, the beginning of each story provided
context for the final word, which was the only
word that children had to read
 However, the predictive quality of the context
provided by the story varied
Perfetti and Roth’s study
 Some contexts were highly predictable
 Children heard:
The garbage men had loaded as much as they
could onto the truck. They would have to drop
off a load at the garbage _________.
 Children read:
dump
Perfetti and Roth’s study
 Some contexts were less predictable
 Children heard:
Albert didn’t have the money he needed to buy
the part to fix his car. Luckily he found the part
he wanted at the _________.
 Children read:
dump
Perfetti and Roth’s study
 Some contexts were anomalous (misleading)
 Children heard:
Phil couldn’t decide whether to go to
the movies or to the party. Both sounded
like lots of fun, but he finally decided to
go to the _________.
 Children read:
dump
How do skilled readers use context?
 Perfetti & Roth measured in milliseconds how
long children in the two groups needed to
read aloud the final word of each story
 If skilled readers use context to help identify
words, what do you predict will happen to
their reading times as they go from highly
predictable to less predictable contexts?
 What about as they go to anomalous
contexts? Click to see their actual results
Time to Read Final Word Aloud
1000
950
900
850
800
750
700
Skilled 4th grade
readers
650
600
550
500
High
Less predictable Anomalous
Predictability of Context
What do these results tell us?
 Skilled readers use context
 Skilled readers read words fastest when the
context was highly predictive
 When contexts were less predictive or
anomalous, skilled readers took almost 100
milliseconds longer to read the same word
How do less-skilled readers use context?
 If less skilled readers do not use context to
help identify words, what do you predict will
happen to their reading times as they go from
highly predictable to less predictable
contexts?
 What about as they go to anomalous
contexts?
 Click to see their actual results
Time to Read Word Aloud
1000
950
900
850
800
750
700
Skilled 4th grade
readers
650
600
550
500
High Less predictable
Anomalous
Predictability of Context
Time to Read Word Aloud
1000
950
Less skilled 4th
grade readers
900
850
800
750
700
Skilled 4th grade
readers
650
600
550
500
High Less predictable
Anomalous
Predictability of Context
What do these results tell us?
 Less skilled readers use context too!
 Less skilled readers read words fastest when
the context was highly predictive
 When contexts were less predictive they took
almost 150 milliseconds longer to read the
same word
 When contexts were anomalous, they took
another 150 milliseconds longer to read the
same word
Who uses context more?
 Less skilled readers were even more
sensitive to context than skilled readers
 The slope of the less skilled readers’ reading
times was steeper as context became less
predictive
 Less skilled readers were especially hesitant
to read a word when it violated the context
Who uses context more?
 This does not mean that skilled readers don’t
use context
 In all but the most predictable contexts,
skilled readers identify words so fast that they
don’t need to use context
Who uses context more?
 How do these results fit with Goodman’s
observations about poor readers not using
context as they read?
 In Perfetti and Roth’s study, the less skilled
readers did not have to read the context; they
got it “for free” by listening
 The problem for less skilled readers is
keeping context in mind when they have to
read it for themselves
Implications of an Interactive Model
 During reading, attention can’t be everywhere
at once, even in an interactive system
 If less skilled readers’ attention is required to
identify individual words, then less attention is
available to devote to building up story
context
 Less skilled readers are in a double bind;
they rely on context more than skilled
readers, but can’t maintain it while reading
The story is more complicated
 Reading is a complex interaction between
bottom up and top down processes
 The experiments you have reviewed here do
not tell the complete story
 Not all readers have difficulties for exactly the
same reasons
 Readers differ in terms of the processing skill
and the knowledge they bring to reading
More to come
 Much of our work for the rest of the term will
examine:



On what knowledge does reading build
How do knowledge and processes interact
How do skilled and less skilled readers differ
See you at our first meeting