The Psychology of Reading

by Keith Rayner, Alexander Pollatsek

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.

Genres: Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[May Ling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Summary: This is an excellent book if you are attempting to understand how to teach reading or speed reading and think through the various obstacles one might face. It will also go through what is happening in the brain. It is not for someone who wants to know how psychology changes as you read.

I have no idea how this book has over 300 ratings but 1 review by a person who likely thought the title meant something other than what Rayner is trying to cover. This book is excellent for my purposes as I have been studying speed reading in preparation for developing a real course, not the hacks I'm seeing on-line. It was recommended by the educator I'm partnering with.

The book starts with reading itself, what it is, what it isn't. Given how early most learned to read it is often taken for granted the way in which one processes written language, how that might differ across different languages, and what methods were used that might be creating obstacles to increasing speed. Part 1 describes this.

Part 2 - goes through the mechanics and two common areas every speed reader needs to understand, subvocalization and eye movement. Usually the hacks in this topic will say a bunch of pleasantries about this that will questionably aid you in picking up your pace. But this is the science that was discovered and for those trying to develop a better more consistent plan for their staff or just because, this needs to first be well understood. (Fixation, Parafovial preview, saccade, word-skipping)

Part 3-4 of the book are quite scientific and got a bit dull for me, but the take aways really have to do with things the book does not address. The ability of the individual to processes written vocabulary and what that means in the context of Part 2. IT's highly relevant, I just thought the presentation could be more direct vs. providing the a building history of the topic. The part of dyslexia and reading disorders also very relevant, if for no other reason that to understand what the healthy brain is doing in contrast to what it could have been doing and how important that skill set really is.

Part 5 - I so wish this was longer. I also wonder if there really is a thing called skimming. The first step to speed reading is getting your pace up an that often results in the comprehension levels seen in what we call skimming. But after a time, you get fast enough to make your skimming speed your speed reading speed. Anyway, that wasn't the point of Rayner's book, so the fact he doesn't go there doesn't take anything away for me.

This is a great resource for those that are attempting to understand the mechanics of the topic. Will definitely be using it's information in my upcoming work.

[Oleksandr Golovatyi · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to speed read? (promo)

Best notes from the book:

"Reading is a highly complex skill that is a prerequisite to success in our society. In a society such as ours, where so much information is communicated in written form, it is important to investigate this essential behavior."

"..how readers go about extracting information from the printed page and comprehending the text."

"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."

"This book is primarily about how the mind processes information during reading… Our focus in the book will be on the reading process for skilled readers who are motivated to read."

"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."

"Skilled readers can identify words that have different meanings in different contexts."

"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"

"the best way to describe the human information-processing system is quite controversial (see Craik and Lockhart 1972; Broadbent 1984). Consisting of three distinct stages (sensory store, short-term memory, and long-term memory)"

"After we move our eyes to place the fovea on the word or words that we want to read, pattern recognition begins. Actually, the pattern recognition process for a word may have begun on the prior fixation when the word was in parafoveal vision, as we shall see in Chapter 4. What we are concerned with in this section is how the brain goes about recognizing the letters and words which must be processed for us to read."

"The lowest level in the information-processing system is generally referred to as the sensory store. For auditory information, the store is referred to as echoic memory (see Cowan 1984 for a discussion). For visual information, the store is referred to as iconic memory. Iconic memory is considered to be a temporary memory store in which much of the information physically available in the stimulus is still available after the display has gone off."

"To summarize, iconic memory is the initial stage in an information processing model. Although highly transient, it has a large capacity. We have also argued that its usefulness for understanding reading is limited since the stimulus is always available to us in reading. However, the concept of a bufferlike store has been useful in experiments related to the reading process."

"According to the standard view of the information-procesing system, due to the transient nature of iconic memory we need to get information registered by the sense organs into a more permanent structure. The structure is short-term memory (STM). Considerable information is lost before it can be transferred to STM because the read-out rate from iconic memory is quite slow. A certain amount of information, however, is transferred to STM, which it turns out has problems of its own. First, and most importantly, it has a limited capacity. The capacity of STM is about 7 plus or minus 2 items (Miller 1956). Notice that we said “items,” not letters, words, or digits. Indeed, we can learn to short-circuit to some extent the limited capacity of short-term memory by various types of chunking strategies."

"Another way that we deal with the capacity limitation of STM is through a process called rehearsal. When you look up a telephone number in the phone book, you often find yourself repeating it (often silently, but sometimes aloud) so that you won’t forget it. In other words, you rehearse the number over and over. Such a strategy is another way to hold information in short-term memory."

"Long-Term Memory. Information in LTM is not organized in a haphazard fashion. Indeed, LTM is highly organized and much of the material that we cannot retrieve has been mislaid, not lost. The major problem with LT M is getting the appropriate retrieval key to access information stored there. This is not surprising given the vast amount of new information we process and store in LTM each day. In addition, there is evidence that the new information we learn interferes with our ability to retrieve previously stored information. Conversely, information already stored in LTM can interfere with retrieving newly learned information."

"Most cognitive psychologists now believe that it is appropriate to think of two types of long-term memory: episodic memory and semantic memory (Tulving 1972). Episodic memory is the memory for sequences of events in your life. Semantic memory, which is more important for understanding reading, contains general knowledge you have. A part of semantic memory that is important for reading is the lexicon. The lexicon, which like LTM itself is highly organized, contains the meanings of the 30,000 or more words that you know. The goal of most reading is to understand something new and to store the gist of it in LTM. To do so involves processing the meanings of the words we know, or accessing our lexicon in LTM. Further, to under stand idioms, metaphors, and the like, we have to use general world knowledge that we have stored there. And when authors are a bit vague, we must make inferences based on What we already know to understand their point."

"There are specific brain functions related to reading."

"Reading is the ability to extract visual information from the page and comprehend the meaning of the text."

"One definition is that writing “is the ‘fixing’ of spoken language in a permanent or semi-permanent form” (Diringer 1962, p. 13)."

"Linguists use the term morpheme to denote certain subword units of meaning."

"Writing is arguably the most important invention in human history."

"In fact, much of what we know about word identification in skilled readers can be summarized by the following statements:
1. Word recognition is relatively automatic, and “higher order processes,” such as constructing the correct syntactic structure, relating word meanings, and fitting the text into what the reader understands about the world, are what takes most of the reader’s processing capacity.
2. Word recognition is not merely converting letters to sounds and then sounds to meaning. In fact, a defensible position is that converting to sound is largely irrelevant to the identification of words (although we believe otherwise). Most researchers do believe, however, that conversion to sound does play a part in the reading process after word identification—largely for its ability to aid short-term memory.
3. Words are not processed serially letter by letter. The letters in common short words appear to be processed in parallel (i.e., at the same time), although words are not learned as visual templates. Longer words may be processed differently, although not much is known about how they are processed.
4. Words are processed pretty much the same way in isolation as in text. While context somewhat affects the speed of processing words, its effects are surprisingly small."

"Since the process of word recognition for skilled readers is so fast and automatic, it is possible that the process of letter identification is bypassed."

"words are more memorable than letters"

"letters in words are actually identified more accurately than letters in isolation"

"It also leads to the conclusion that word shape is not an important cue for word identification (see Paap, Newsome, and Noel 1984, for corroborating evidence)."

"When we read we have the impression that our eyes (and mind) sweep continuously across the text except for a few places in which we encounter difficulty, and at those points we pause to consider what we have just read or regress (go back) to reread earlier material. However, that impression is an illusion. First, the progress of the eyes across the page is not continuous. The eyes come to rest for periods that are usually between 150 and 500 ms; these periods when the eye is close to immobile are called fixations. Between the fixations are periods during which the eyes are moving rapidly. These eye movements are called saccades after the French word for jump. Saccades are ballistic movements (i.e., once they start, they cannot be altered)."

"it is important to keep in mind that factors like how frequent the word is in the English language has a large impact on how long the eyes remain on any given word."

"In character spaces (4 character spaces = 1° of visual angle)" !!

"In reading, the average saccade is about seven to nine letter spaces long, or about 2 degrees of visual angle at a normal reading distance."

"Summary. We have summarized the basic facts about eye movements in reading. The eyes move about four or five times per second and jump an average of about seven to nine letter spaces each time they move for readers of English. However, the eyes move back about 10–15% of the time and there is large variability in both the extent of the forward motion and the amount of time they stay in a fixation. Since virtually all the information is extracted during the fixations, the interest in fixations is on how their duration reflects the processing of information during the fixation. Since saccades exist to move the eyes to another fixation, the interest in saccades is the extent to which the direction and size of the saccade reflect what is being processed."

How to read fast? (promo)

"When the sequence of words was essentially random, participants were able to report just over two words (or roughly 13 character spaces), while when the sequences were close to normal English, they reported three or four words (18 to 26 character spaces). Since the stimuli in this last condition are most like normal text, perhaps three to four words provides a good estimate of the perceptual span in reading. !!! [human can read 3-4 words a one glance]"

"foveal vision (i.e., the central seven letters around the fixation point)"

"part of parafoveal vision (i.e., the central 11–17 letter spaces around the fixation point)"

"Reading skill also influences the size of the perceptual span, since beginning readers (Häikiö, Bertram, Hyönä, & Niemi, 2009; Rayner, 1986) and dyslexic readers (Rayner, Murphy, Henderson, & Pollatsek, 1989) have smaller spans than more skilled readers."

"What is more interesting, and very strong support for the notion of direct control, is that how long the eyes remain in place is very much influenced by the frequency of the fixated word: if the word is a  low-frequency word, the eyes remain in place longer than if it is a high-frequency word."

"several conclusions emerged:
(1) encoding of shorter words occurs through a process in which the letters are processed in parallel;
(2) conversion to sound is definitely involved in accessing the meaning of a word for skilled readers, although there is some controversy about how important or universal that involvement is;
(3) for longer words (especially those with more than one morpheme) this parallel processing is likely to break down and such words are likely to be processed in more than one chunk;
(4) word encoding is relatively automatic."

"In Chapter 3 we investigated the issue of automaticity of word encoding by looking at three issues. The first was whether people could process the meaning of a word without being aware of it and the answer was “yes.” The second was whether people would process the meaning of a word even when they were not trying to—or probably, trying not to—process it. The answer to the second question was also “yes.”"

"here is a large body of data indicating that when word N is fixated, there is considerable processing of word N+1 (the word to the right). Surely this must mean that more than one word is being processed at a time!"

"words are also skipped more often for “deeper reasons”: either because they are frequent in the language or predictable from prior context."

"models of eye movements in reading that posit parallel processing of words: Glenmore (Reilly & Radach, 2006) and SWIFT (Engbert, Nuthmann, Richter, & Kliegl, 2005)."

"speech tract (either muscle movement or articulatory processes) as “subvocalization,”"

"Oral reading rates are generally in the range of 150–200 words per minute and are a good approximation of speech rates (Rayner & Clifton, 2009), while silent reading rates for skilled readers are around 300 words per minute."

"Kleiman’s concurrent activity was “shadowing”. In the shadowing task participants listen to digits and they repeat them aloud (“shadow them”) in order to suppress subvocalization. The primary task (i.e., the one participants are supposed to attend to) involves making judgments about visually presented words or sentences as quickly as possible."

"dyslexia (reading disorders caused by brain injury)"

"dyslexia (difficulty in learning to read in the absence of identified neurological, emotional, motivational, or cognitive handicaps)"

"Three stages of reading development:
1. Learning to Read (1–3 grade range): Initial reading and decoding. Building fluency. Listening comprehension better than reading comprehension;
2. Reading to Learn (4–9 grade range): Subject area reading. Vocabulary expands through reading. Reading comprehension equal to or better than listening comprehension;
3. Independent Reading (10–College grade range): Wide reading in different subjects and genres. Continued vocabulary expansion. Can integrate multiple viewpoints. Reading is more efficient than listening."

"The size of a child’s sight word vocabulary is the main factor that allows a child to read accurately at a conversational rate and with appropriate intonation (Torgesen & Hudson, 2006). Once in the consolidated alphabetic phase, children become sensitive to frequent letter sequences such as "-nt" or "-ing" (Kessler, 2009). Words are read and spelled using groups of letters that indicate morphemes and syllables."

"Children who develop emergent literacy skills and fundamental print skills before entering first grade have several advantages in learning to read. First, they know that print occurs in different forms (e.g., lists, poems, and stories), and they implicitly understand how the writing system operates. Second, they are familiar with the letter forms and sequences that support early writing and spelling. Third, they have started to think about how words sound, and to realize that some words sound more alike than others (cat/mat vs. kitty/rug). These foundation skills help to develop recognition of a word as an orthographic unit that has a spoken form and meaning."

"To become a proficient reader a child must learn some very specific skills. These skills mainly involve understanding the relationship between printed symbols, phonological forms, and semantic referents. In other words, children learn to map the unfamiliar letter strings they find in print onto words in their spoken vocabulary. This mapping of letters onto sounds marks the beginning of reading development, and mastery of that alphabetic principle is a critical bridge to getting meaning from print."

"especially important for early reading instruction to develop the alphabetic decoding skills that are the foundation of fluent reading."

"Larger effects were observed when instruction began before or during first grade, rather than in later grades, indicating that systematic phonics instr"

"Color- and object-naming speed in preschool and kindergarten predicts reading achievement in first grade"

"Approximately 10–25% of children with reading disorders can read single words accurately and fluently, but have problems understanding the meaning of text (Aaron, Joshi, & Williams, 1999; Leach et al., 2003). This difficulty was initially termed hyperlexia."

"By skimming we mean the type of reading activity in which you skim over the text without really deeply comprehending it."

"Speed-reading proponents claim that you should be able to increase your reading speed from 200–400 words per minute (wpm from here on), which is the normal range for college students, to 2000 wpm or even faster. There have been speed readers who purport to have reading rates in excess of 10,000 wpm!"

"Central to the claim of speed-reading proponents is the idea that our brain is rather lazy and we only process effectively a small proportion of what it is capable of doing. In particular, speed-reading proponents argue that reading speed can be increased by taking in more information per eye fixation and by eliminating inner speech, which is seen as a drag on reading speed. By processing more per fixation the brain is presumably forced to operate closer to maximal capacity, and supposedly there will be no loss of comprehension."

"The important claim of speed-reading proponents is thus that reading speed can be dramatically increased without any penalty on (or loss of) comprehension."

"Traxler, Williams, Blozis, and Morris (2005) initially reported that working memory span predicted syntactic and semantic effects on eye fixations during reading."

"skilled readers are quite flexible in the range of reading or reading-like behaviors they can employ; they can modulate the “reading” speed as a function of their task or goal. "

What Is Speed Reading? (promo)

[Jackie · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's nothing worse to kill your joy of reading than a book about reading that is not enjoyable at all to read.