and Helder, computational models can guide reading curricula and make recommendations for both explicit instruction and implicit learning via reading experience. Advances in computational models of learning to read are likely to provide an important future direction with important educational implications.
In the first edition of this book, Lupker (2005) and Van Orden and Kloos (2005) reviewed a large body of experimental evidence concerned with how adults recognize printed words. Any complete model of word recognition has many phenomena to explain: that people perceive letters more efficiently when they are embedded in words than presented in isolation, that high‐frequency (i.e., more familiar) words are recognized more easily than less familiar words, and various patterns of priming. One conclusion that emerged powerfully from these earlier reviews was the need for interactive models in which activation of orthographic and phonological information reciprocally influence each other. In this second edition, three chapters on skilled visual word recognition continue and expand on this theme. Grainger begins by discussing the orthographic processes that mediate between vision and language when translating letters into word representations. He argues that words are the basic units of reading, and that letters are the basic units of words. Careful experimentation has shown that skilled readers use abstract information about the identity and position of letters to recognize words, and that processing is cascaded and interactive. Beyond word identification, he suggests that sentence reading – or at least the interface between whole‐word representations and the sentence – is governed by mechanisms that share the same general characteristics, namely processing that is interactive, cascaded, and performed at least partly in parallel. These allow the syntactic and semantic representations required for sentence comprehension to be activated rapidly from orthography. Grainger notes that word recognition and sentence processing have tended to be investigated within two independent lines of research, a theme echoed in several chapters of the handbook. Future work needs to better integrate evidence across words, sentences and texts to fully understand how reading happens.
While Grainger focuses on orthographic processes in skilled reading, Brysbaert tackles the role of phonology. Taking a historical perspective, he describes how researchers have defended very different positions over the years, from full phonological mediation between print and meaning through to no phonological involvement at all. It is now widely accepted that phonology plays a central role in skilled word reading. In alphabetic writing systems, phonology is particularly important in the early stages of reading development, when the ability to assemble the phonological form of an unknown word is foundational. Brysbaert’s review makes clear that phonology continues to be engaged automatically in skilled word reading. At least in alphabetic writing systems, orthographic and phonological processes jointly contribute to visual word recognition and this is achieved via coding interactions in the brain. Brysbaert closes by considering how extant models of word recognition accommodate the central role of phonology.
Since the first edition of the handbook, word recognition research has expanded to include detailed consideration of morphology. This progress is reviewed by Rastle in the context of processing English. Morphemes are defined as the smallest unit of meaning and are either stems or affixes. The majority of words in English (and many other languages) are built from morphemes. Although there is a tendency to think of the relationship between print and meaning as largely arbitrary, morphological structure represents an important interface between orthography and meaning. Rastle provides many examples of graded systematicity in the mappings between spelling and meaning at the level of morphemes. Skilled readers are highly sensitive to these “islands of regularity,” many of which are preserved in the writing system, often at the expense of maintaining regularity between spelling and sound. This means that morphological information is highly visible in the writing system. Rastle reviews evidence showing that morphological information is activated by skilled readers during the course of visual word recognition and discusses how different models of word recognition can capture these influences; like earlier chapters in this section, she emphasizes the value of computational approaches. Rastle reminds us that the goal of reading words is to rapidly compute their meaning, and therefore that the goal of learning to read is to develop a system that maps orthography to meaning quickly, directly, and accurately. Although morphological effects in skilled word recognition are well documented, far less research has considered how morphemic knowledge becomes represented in the reading system as children learn to read. Rastle identifies this as an important direction for future work, highlighting the likely role that reading experience plays as the substrate for establishing probabilistic mappings between orthography and meaning.
References
1 Cattell, J. M. (1886). The time taken up by cerebral operations. Mind, 11, 220–242.
2 Coltheart, M. (2005). Modeling reading: The dual‐route approach. In M.J. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp. 6–23). Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470757642.ch1.
3 Lupker, S. J. (2005). Visual word recognition: Theories and findings. In M.J. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp. 39–60). Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470757642.ch3.
4 Plaut, D. C. (2005). Connectionist approaches to reading. In M.J. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp. 24–38). Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470757642.ch2.
5 Van Orden, G. C., & Kloos, H. (2005). The question of phonology and reading. In M.J. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), The science of reading: A handbook (pp. 61–78). Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470757642.ch3.
CHAPTER ONE Progress in Reading Science : Word Identification, Comprehension, and Universal Perspectives
Charles Perfetti and Anne Helder
Like the flow of a stream, skilled reading is a mix of fast and slow currents. The rapid identification of words and their meanings co‐occur with almost‐as‐rapid meaning integration processes. Moving along simultaneously is a current of deeper, more contextualized comprehension and interpretation. Understanding how these overlapping currents work to produce skilled reading is one goal of a systems approach to reading.
In 1972, Philip Gough published a paper titled “One Second of Reading” (Gough, 1972). During this second, Gough’s estimations of various visual and coding processes implied that 9 words were read. This is the rapid current of ‘online’ reading observable by the tools of reading science, which have supported much of its progress. In what follows, we highlight advances in the study of skilled reading, from word identification to comprehension, emphasizing language and writing system influences, the convergence of brain and behavior data, with brief links to reading difficulties and learning to read.
We begin by replacing our metaphor of stream currents with a static representation of what reading science seeks to explain, drawing on the Reading Systems Framework (RSF) (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). Although a dynamic model may capture the reality of reading as it happens, a component systems model allows us to describe this reality more clearly. The RSF, illustrated in Figure 1.1, organizes the knowledge sources (collectively, the knowledge systems) that drive both word identification and comprehension. The lexicon – knowledge about word forms and their meanings – is central in connecting these two systems. We apply the framework to examine research progress, describing three significant advances.
