C0gnifion.

9 (1981) 73-114
@ Eseviet Sequoia S.A., Lausanne - Printed in the Netherlands

Building theoriesof reauingability:

On the relation between individual differencesin
cognitiveskills and readingcomprehension*
THOMAS H. CARR
Michigan State University

Abstract
To date most theories of reading ability have emphasized a single factor as
the major source of individual differences in performance. However there has
been littleagreement on what thatfactor is. However, candidates have included
visual discrimination, phonological and semantic recoding, short-term
memorv, and utilization of linguistic knowledge and context. The singlefactor theories are summarized. Literature is then reviewed to show that no
single-factor theory is likely to be right, because a very wide range of component skills and abilities has in fact been shown to covrelate w,th reading
success, Among them are discrimination of letter location and letter order
during perceptual recognition, use of orthographic regularity as an aid to
visual code formation, use of spelling-to-sound regularity in phonological
recoding, memory for word order, spontaneous identification cf syntactic
relations, flexibility in prediction from syntactic and semantic context, and
context-specificity in semantic encoding. It is concluded that more complex,
multifactor models of reading ability are required, and some recent attempts
to collect data conducive to such a model are described. In the process,
three different approaches to id, tifying factors relevant to reading success
are delineated. These are general abilities assessment, learning potential
assessment, and component skills analysis, Two methods of conducting
component skills analysis are presented, and it is recommended that they be
used as converging operations, Finally, the results of a component skills
analysis are used to construct a tentative example of a class of hierarchical
modeis of reading ability that can be pursued developmentally.

*I would hke to thank Roderick W. Barron,J. Kathryn Bock. Denise Frieder0x1, MaryAnn Evans,
Margot Haynes, Janet Kistner, Martin H. Singer, Rose T. Zacks, and two anonymous reviewersfor
their insightful comments and criticismsduring the preparationof this paper. Addresscorrespondence
to Thomas H. Cbr, Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan,
USA 48824.

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Thotms H cm-r

Current theories and their viability

Psychologists always prefer a +nple theory to a complex one, as long as both

explain
the data. Consistent with this predilection, explanations of individual
differences in reading comprehension and reading achievement have often
focused on single factors. Vanation in one component skill has either explicitly or irrplicitly been heldhfisponsible for most of the variation observed m
overall performance. Single-factor theories have been especially popular as
explanations of severely deficient reading achievement or dyslexia. Such
accounts would be grand in their parsimony were they consistent with all
that is known about reading, but I will argue in this paper that single-factor
theories are simply too simple to be correct. Current data indicate that no
component skill can explain a sufficie;\t amount of individual variation in
reading performance to warrent a single-factor theory. This suggests that a
synthesis will have to be undertaken.
There are basically four major clas%csof smgle-factor theories, hypothesizing deficits among poor readers in: (1) visual discrimination and visual code
formation, (2) phonological and semantic recoding, (3) short-term memory,
and (4) the utilization of linguistic knowledge and context to guide perceptual recognition and encoding. By defmition these hypotheses could not all
be true if a single-factor theory were viable, and it does appear that they are
not equally powetiul. How to rankorder them remains a matter for debate.
Despite possible differences in explanatory power, however, the four classes
of single-factor theories may each capture a piece of the truth, though indivjdual theories within some of the classes may be quite wrong.
In order to support these claims, several bodies of literature will be reviewed vriirh the goal of demonstrating that a wide range of information
processing skills has been shown to vary with reading ability, including
most (though not all) of the skills around which single-factor theories have
been built. The job facing researchers is therefore not to find out which
single-factor theory is correct, but to discover how big a piece of the truth
each of them actually captures. Some preliminary data pertaining to that
question will be discussed. Because of the variety of skUls that have been
shown to differ between good and poor readers, a plea will be made for
theories that allow reading ability to be multiply rather than singly determined-research should be oriented towards the construction of a functional
ath of reading-related individual differences in cognition, rather than toward
identifjkg the-cause of ftiure at reading.
The plan of the paper is to set the stage by summarizing the nature of the
explanations for reading abihty offered in the major classes of single-factor
theories. After a brief digression into the relative merits of terms like dys-

Building theoriesof reading ability

75

lexia, reading disability, and *poor reading, the range of information

processing skills that vary with measured reading comprehension will be
established. Where independence of a skill may be in doubt, an effort will be
ICS??P,
to show whether or not individual differences in that skill might better
be regarded as the result of individual differences in some other more fundamental or *moregeneral skill. Frequent reference will be made to short-term
memory explaklations in this regard, since short-term memory is the broadest
and most flexible of the various concepts on which single-factor theories have
rehed. Finally a few recent studies will be mentioned in which readers have
been administered batteries of information processing tasks spanning large
portions of the range of skills on which good and poor readers have been
shown to differ. From these studies some conclusions will be drawn about
the likelihood that we c(n.nsuccessfully establish the relative contributions of
each skill to overall comprehension performance and identify patterns o.
coherence and dissociation among the skills. If those things could be accomplished, we might be able to go on to identify subgroups of good or poor
readers who show different profiles of skill strength and weakness, and who
would therefore require different types or instructional arrangements in order
to become better readez than they currently are.
Single-factor theories of reading ability
The first class of single-factor theories postulates a deficit among low-ability

readers in visual discrimination (Benton, 1962; Critchley, 1964, 1970; Orton,

1966). Traditionally these theories have focused on the perception of spatial
orientation with the occurrence of reversal errors in letter identification,
such as mistaking b for d or q for I, serving as a major source of their support. Several studies now indicate that reversal errors might be more common
among younger than older children, but are no more common among poor
than good readers (Firth, 1972; Goodnow, 1972; Shankweiler and Lieberman,
1972; Vellutino, Steger, and Kendal, 1972). Visual discrimination theories
therefore appe:-r to be unique in that the factor supposed by many of them
to underlie the entirety of dyslexia may not account for any of it. However,
the case is not closed on a relation between reading disability and some other
characteristics of visual discrimination, including spatial location, spatial
order, and temporal resolution (Mason, 1980; ONeill and Stanley, 1976;
Stanley and Hall, 1973).
Visual disc,rimination theories of the kind just described have been concerned for the most part with primary processes of sensory registration,
feature extraction, and feature combination. Several recent investigations
have reached the conclusion that these primary processes are relatively un-

related to reading ability, but that poor re;: iers show less benefit than good
readers from secondary feedback mechanisms in the visual system. These
feedback mechanisms take advantage of predictable spelling patternsreferred to as orthographic regularity-to
facilitate visual encoding (Frederiksen, Note 1; Mason, 1975; Massao and Taylor, Nots 2). Research on the
utilizatron of orthographic regularity has not yet produced a singJe-factor
model in which the major cause of reading disability is held to be a deficit in
visual code formation resulting from inefficient feedback mechanisms. Given
the history of reading research, that may be only a matter of time. However,
problems in dealing with a closely related structural property of the writing
s/stem have figured prominently in single-factor explanaZions of poor reading
performance.
This second class of single-factor theories postulates a deficit in phonological and semantic recoding. Acpordinlb to the recoding theories, word
recognition is severely impaired because the poor reader has trouble translating from spelhngpatterns to pronunciation and to meaning. These theories
vary tremendously in scope and degree of elaboration; four examples will
illustrate their range. Vellutino (1977) argues that poor readers suffer a
pervasive verb91 deficit that interferes with any and all activities requiring
verbal labels to be activated or manipulated. Rozin and Gleitman (1977) on
the other hand, severely restrict the domain of verbal abilities in which there
are thought to be deficits among poor readers. As long as the relation between
printed and spoken versions of words can be handled at the level of the whole
word or the sy?!able, learning to recognize words is easy. But when word
sounds must be analyzed into phonemes, word recognition becomes a difficult task to master. Because phonemes are abstract categories (Chomsky,
1970; Chomsky and HaJle, 1968; Rozin and Gleitman, 1977), spslech sounds
and spellings do not correspond in one-toone fashion at the level of the
phoneme. The ability to analyze speech sounds into phonemes and to make
c~nntions between the abstract sound categories and spelling patterns is
called phonemic awareness (Golinkoff, 1978)~and according to Rozin
and Gleitman poor readers lack sufficient phonemic awareness to be able to
learn to use phonics rules to translate print into spoken words and vice verse
with any degree of facility.
Em phonemic awareness hypothesis is a claim about the crsnsciously
apdble
linguistic knowledge of the poor reader (Rozin, 1976). A recoding
theory of sm@ar scope comes from Perfe tti and Lesgold (1978), but focuses
on procedural rather than declarative knowledge of spelling-to-sound correspondence In tirisview, the extent to which spelling-twound translation rules
have been integrated into well established procedural subroutines or pronuntliation schemas is crucial to reading ability. Poor readers often have

Building theoriesof reading ability

77

much more difficulty than good readers in pronouncing unfamiliar but

orthographically and phonetically regular letter combinations (dop, spod)
yet manage to do quite well at pronouncing familiar combinations with which
they have had considerable prior reading experience (dog, snot). Perfetti and
Lesgold agree with Rozin and Gleitman that for dog a pronunciation is
stored in memory and can be retrieved directly via paired-associate mechanisms, while for dop a pronunciation must be constructed via analytic
spelling-to-sound translation rules. At some point the translation mechanism
must deal with correspondences between phonemes and individual letters or
letter clusters. Whereas Rozin and Gleitman are concerned with the difficulty
of grasping the concepts underlying phonemic analysis, Perfetti and Lesgold
are concerned with the difficulty of applying the concepts once they are
grasped. Early in learning to read, carrying out spelling-to-sound translation
demands a lot of attention according to Perfetti and Lesgold. Given that that
capacity within the information processing system is limited, attention
devoted to recoding is not available to support higher-order memory maintenance and comprehension processes. Recoding mechanisms become progressively more automated with practice. Until recoding reaches P sufficient
level of automaticity, however, comprehension processes will suffer due to a
lack of cognitive resources to be allocated to their operation. Poor reac rs
have not been able to automate recoding mechanisms to the same extent as
good readers, and as a re:sult do not comprehend text as well. This kind of
argument was first advanced by Bryan and Harter (1899). Huey (1908)
relied upon it as well, making Perfetti and Lesgolds version one of the latest
in a venerable line.
Both the phonemic awareness and the attention demand hypotheses distinguish between recoding relatively unfamiliar words (which is thought to
be hard) and recoding familiar words for which phonological and semantic
codes are already stored as visually-addressable units (which is thought to be
much easier). Jackson and McCleiland (1979), however, do not spare poor
readers even the ability to utilize paired-associate mechanisms. In what might
be called the higher-order access hypothesis, Jackson and McClelland argue
that poor readers are slower and less accurate in activating any nonvisual
internal representation of a printed word, including codes that are dready
stored and need only to be retrieved rather than constructed. The higherorder access hypothesis is genericaIly similar to Vellutinos notion of a verbal
deficit, but is nrore firmly grounded in a theory of underlying mental operations. Because a particular operation, memory retrieval, is specified as the
locus of the poor readers difficulti], Jackson and McClellands hypothesis is
better def ;ed and therefore more testable than Vellutinos (see Singer,
1979).

78

ThomasH. Cam

A third

class

of single-factor theories does not deny that poor rea&:rs have

trouble with phonemic recoding, and especially with rule-goverr:::d spelling-

to_scand translation, but SW recoding difficulty as a by-product of a more

fundrmental deficit in short-term meml3ry. In many ways these theories have
the most a priori power of the single-fat tor explanations, because short-term
memory is a broad and malleable enough concept to potentially subsume a
very large and diverse collection of idhiditd
phenomena. For this reason
proponents of short-term memory theories bear a particular burden of precision in defining constructs as well as in specifying exactly how the constructs
are to explain the observed characteristics of reading performance.
There are two main types of short-term memory theory that differ in the
extent of the proposed storage deficit, and a third hybridized theory that
demonstrates how short-term memory and recoding hypotheses can shade
into one another. The broadest of the short-term memory theories might be
called the generalized short-term maintenance hypothesis. Jorm (i979), for
example, claims that all dyslexia, both developmental and traumatically
induced, results from a relative inability to keep several codes or chunks of
information simultaneously active in short-term store, and that a malfunctioning left inferior parietal lobe is responsible for this deficiency. A more
limited short-term memory theory holds that the ability to maintain the
identities of a series of items does not vary much with reading skill, but
maintaining the order in which the items occurred gives poor readers much
difficulty (Doehring, 1968; Torgeson, 1978). Corkin (1974) believes that
this notion has great power to explain the inability of dyslexics to learn to
read, and Singer (1979), though not proposing a single-factor model, argues
that the serial order hypothesis has considerable merit. The third, hybridized,
short-term memory theory is an extension by Perfetti and Lesgold (1978) of
their attention-demand recoding hypothesis. Because of difficulty with
recoding operations, poor readers are inordinately slow and inefficient at
encoding new items into short-term sfort!, and they are also, according to
Perfetti and Lesgold, slow and inefficient at clearing old items out of it. A
smooth flow of information through shorlt-term store keeps comprehension
mechanisms that make use of that information operating at their best. The
hfficient
encoding and forgetting of the poor reader causes a backlog or
traffic jam in short-term store that interferes with comprehension. This backlog, in which accurate encodings cannot be made available to comprehension
Processes at a fast enough rate, is called hysteresis by Perfetti and Lesgold,
from the Latin term meaning to lag behind. If hysteresis is severe enough,
comp=bension processes can grind nearly to a halt and understanding can
break down completely. Because of its hybrid character, the hysteresis
hypothesis is hard to classify as either a short-term memory theory or a

Buildingtheoriesof reading ability

79

recoding theory. The locus of comprehension failure is considered to be

short-term memory, but storage capacity per se is not the culprit. Trouble
arises in getting codes for words into short-term store to begin with, and in
forgetting them after their information has been integrated into a longer-term
representation of the text of which they are a part.
The hysteresis hypothesisis complicated, and Perfeili and Lesgold actually
provide no evidence that codes are slow to be cleared out as well as slow to
be entered into short-term store. One might even argue that their position
contradicts the other short-term memory theories, in which forgetting is
faster rather than slower among poor readers On the one hand, a kind of
active or directed forgetting may be a part of comprehension-when
constituent boundaries are reached, short-term store appears to be cleared of
phonological codes representing surface structure in P way that ordinary
processes of decay and interference (cannot explain (Chang, 1980; Clark and
Clark, 1977; Davidson, 1978; Jarvella, 1970, 1971). If such a short-term
memory mechanism exists, then individual difference; in its efficiency could
affe-t reading comprehension. On the other hand, the hysteresis hypothesis
could be reworked into a somewhat simpler claim without sacrificing the
spirit of Perfetti and Lesgolds argument for a close connection between
recoding and memory maintenance. If the same source of limited capacity is
needed both to recode visual material and to store the codes so activated,
then the harder it is to recode the less can be stored (Baddeley, 1979;
Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Carr, 1979). Trading off storage for work, then,
would reduce comprehension by increasmg short-term memory loss among
readers who find recoding extraordinariIy difficult. This is in fact the attention-demand recoding hypothesis already attributed to Perfetti and Lesgold,
with short-term memory specified as the particular higher-order process from
which recoding steals resources.
The three classes of models discussed so far all point toward bottom-up or
data-driven processes as the source of reading disability--poor readers are
forced at some point in the reading process to work with lower quality visual,
phonoIogica1 or semantic encodings of the printed words than good readers.
The fourth class of single-factor models places the blame for reading disability on a failure of top-down or knowledge-driven processes instead. Poor
readers do not make as extensive or efficient use of world knowledge, of
linguistic knowledge, or of the context provided by what has already been
read to guide the acquisition and interpretation of data from upcoming parts
of a passage.
Two roles are usualIy attributed to top-down processmg, and either can be
the main source of reading problems depending on the particular theory.
First, increasing knowledge of the language shows print to be encoded in

80

nlomas fi. GUT

targer and larger units-- letter clusters rather than letters, whole words rather
than letter clusters, constituent phrases rather than words (Laflerge, 1979;
With, 1971, 1973). Greater unitization leads to gloater efficiency of encoding, short-term maintenance, comprehension, ;?d long-term storage by
reducing the number of chunks of information required to represent a given
text. Second, greater sensitivity to the context provided by already-read
text allows moire and better predictions about information that is likely to
be coming up next. Greater context use leads to greater efficiency by turning
reading into a !;ophistic:ated guessing ganie in which much less stimulus information has to be processed to gain a given level of understanding (Goodman,
1969, 1973; Rumelhart, 197;, 1978; Friedrich, Note 3). Top-down deficit
theorie;, then, postulate that poor readers fti to use linguistic knowledge to
increase unitization or fail to use context to increase predictive support for
perceptual recognitim and comprehension. 4s Rozin and Gleitman (1977)
have summarized the arguments o$ the top-down deficit theories, poor
reader. _4 plodders mired in the data, processing each bit of print to the
same depth .3ne bit at a time. Good readers are explorers who pick and
choose, processing some parts of the text to great depth and other parts only
superficially depending on the redundancy and predictability of each parts
content 3n relation to the overall meaning the text is conveying.
On terminology

Now thst a summary of the single-f&or theories has been completed, the
main thsk is to review the information processing literature in order to
demonst-ats which of the skills addressed in all these theories do in fact vary
with overall reading performance. First, however, a question of terminology
ought to be raised. In summarizing the single-factor theories, I have used the
terms dysl~exia, reading disability, and poor reading or poor reader
~4th apparent indiscrimination. This is true of the reading literature in general,
and I would like briefly to discuss the, imphcations of adopting one terminology over another. Particularly significant consequences attach to the use of
the term dyslexia, which will be criticized in the next sectilon.
What is dyslexia ?
The tern dyslexia is usually used to refer to the reading performance of

people who, despite conventional classroom experience, fail to attain the

language &ills of reading, writing, and spelling commensurate with their
intellectu:d abilities (Jorm, 1979, p. 19). Though widely accepted since it
was introduced by Critchley (1964), this dzfmition causes many more

Building rheoriesof reading ability

81

prcblems than it solves. First, reading as an input process and writing as an

output process have somewhat different control structures, at least in proficient adults. Frith (1979) reports that the largest number of errors in word
recognition bear visual similarity to II;&target word bur the preponderance
of errors in spelling bear phonological similarity. If input and output processes operating on text are at least partially independent, then a person
could be skilled at one but not the other. This actually happens according to
Gibson and Levin (1975), who argue that good readers are not necessarily
good spellers. Second, reading comprehension appears to be better established
in nearly everyone than is writing composition (more people can read, understand, and enjoy William Faulkner than can write as good a short story).
Thus reading, writing, and spelling dont always vary together, even though
recognizing and spelling words share some processes in common (Baron,
1979; Barron, 1979; Carr and Evans, in press, Simon and Simon, 1973) as do
comprehending and composing prose (Bock and Irwin, 1980; Kintsch and
van Dijk, 1078).
If writing 2nd spelling were dropped and readir; .were used as the only
criterion p?sformance, there would still be a good deal of doubt about whose
reading performance is to be explained. This is because the remaining terms
of the definition are themselves very difficult to define. First we have to
decide what is meant by conventional classroom experience. For example,
Evans (1979) has compared 10 classrooms in a large Canadian school system
that use a formally organized, teacherdirected (or traditional) curriculum
to 10 classrooms with similar students from the same school system that use
an informally organized, student-centered (or open) curriculum. A larger
proportion of students were reading below grade level in the infomral curriculum than in the formal curriculum. Should the informal classroom organization count as conventional experience, and should children from the two
kinds of curricula be studied together? Or should the informal curriculum be
excluded from the realm of conventional classroom experience? If it is excluded, then principled grounds for exclusion would have to be defined, and
from then on only children who fail to learn to read in some restricted subset of the many school curricula in use around the world could be stludied as
dyslexic.
Other difficulties arise from the phrase commensurate with their intellectual abilities. The proper meaning of comn,znsurate and incommensurate cant be determined scientifically. Guidelines can be agreed upon,
but in the end the decision is largely arbitrary. Could we say, for example,
that incommensurate reading ability is a grade-level competence two
standard deviations below the grade-level equivalent of the childs mental
age on an accepted test of intellectual ability? If so, why? If not, why not?

82

77tamasH. Gm

And if so, what test of intellectual ability should be accepted? Ideas on the
measurement of atelligence are in tremendous flux (e.g., Resnick, 1976)
and it is unclear that the IQ test will remain a viable instrument even in cases
where cultural bias is not a serious problem. An alternative to IQ testing that
is gaining favorrapidly is the assesment of basic information processing skills
(Carroll and Maxwell, 1979; Simon, 1979; Sternberg, 1977). Many of the
basic skills to be assessed are implicated by single-factor theories as causes of
dyslexia- if this approach were accepted, then equating readers in intelligence would create a paradox for the Pheories.
But enough. Differences in reading achievement associated with differences
in curriculum could be investigated directly by appropriate selection of
subjects (e.g., Carr and Evans, in press) or else factored out statistically, and
a large Jattery of converging indicators could be applied to give at least a
reaonable feeling that children chosen for study as poor readers are not poor
at everything. The sorts of primarily methodological refinements proposed
so far, ho-wever,would not entirely meet my objections to the use of the term
dyslexia. Although the defmition is relative, its applicaticzr?all too soon
becomes absolute in the arguments of most people who employ it. Speaking
of the dyslexic brings to mind a dichotomous distinction: you either have
dyslexia or you dont. A quick look at the subjects in studies cited by
almost anyo.\e reviewing the reading literature indicates that this is not true,
that there is n3 uniform set of criteria in use that will consistently identify
one person as dyslexic and another as normal. As an illustration using
some commonlycifted stud,
i-s, many of the subjects from the low ability
group of Guthrie (1973) or Katz and Wicklund (1972) would not be classified
as poor readers by Rozin, Poritsky, and Sotskys (197 1) standards, and few
of Boders (197 1, 1973) clinical patients would have shown up in any of the
available experimental studies- they were too bad. Yet some remarkably
consistent differences tiave emerged from comparison of better and poorer
readers regardless of where on the continuum of measured ability their
absolute comprehension performances fall.
Rather than discus&g the dyslexic, then, it might be more protitable at
this stage of the game to Esk whether or not individual differences in specific
information processing &ills are reliably related to individual differences in
reading ability (see Calfee, 1977; Carroll and Maxwell, 1979; McClelland and
Jackson, 1978). This question focuses attention on the fact that reading ability
v&es continuously rather than discontinuously or bhnodally. Like distributions of tested IQ, distributions of tested reading ability are essentially normal,
with a small bump at the low end. The bump in IQ r,isttibutions represents people with congenital brain damage or chromosomal disorders, to which a medical model of mental retardation as a dichotomous condition can be applied.

Building theoriesof reading ability

83

The remainder of tht distributionisnot at all subject to dichotomous classification into a retarded group and a normal group. The same situation
seems to hold for reading (e.g., Yule, Rutter, Berger, and Thompson, 1974).
Therefore I will refer in the rest of the paper to better and poorer readers,
or to good and poor readers as a shorthand, intending to indicate a contrast
between two points located somewhere on the continuum of reading ability
or achievement as assessed by comprehension tests. Depending on the study
being cited, these points may be separated by anywhere from one to four
grade levels or two to four stanines of the ability or achievement distribution
observed at a particular age. This choice of terminology is not so much intended to add information that the use of dyslexic and dyslexia obscures,
as it is to discard excess connotational baggage in hopes of finding a more
neutral-and
more accurate-way
of referring to variation among readers
in overall proficiency.
Skill differences among readers

The next several pages will examine the evidence on information processing
skills that vary with comprehension performance. I noted earlier that care
has to be given to establishing the independence of these various skills from
one another--to establishing that some particular kmd of cognitive performance is not just a special case of some other more fundamental or more
general kind of performance. For that reason I will start with the evidence
on short-term memory differences as a function of reading ability, since, as
already noted, short-term memo-y is the most flexible of the theoretical
constructs that have been used to explain limi ,;;ons on performance in
reading-related information proceqsing tasks.
Are short-term memwy differ.mes related to reading ability?
The most encompassing of the short-term memory theories is the generalized

short-term maintenance hypothesis offered by Jorm (1979). The major emhat dyslexic children have a deficit in
pirical claim in Jorms paper
short-term memory for both visually and auditorially presented materialthat is, that reading ability and differences in short-term memory performance are reliably related. In the literature, several cognitive functions have
been attributed to short-term memory, including temporary storage, executive control, and selective attention (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Carr, 1979).
It is the storage function that Jorm considers important. This claim that
reading ability and short-term memory performance correlate appears to be

true. However, when the claim is differentiated with respect tP what kind of
information is being stored, items or their order of occurrence, it becomes
apparent that the generalized short-term maintenance hypothesis is too broad
to be useful.
Substantial evidence now exists that item and order information must be
considered separately in studies of reading-related information processing.
In at least three different kinds of short-term memory tasks, order information is lost more rapidly than item information and the difference in rate of
loss for the two kinds of information is greater for poor than for good
readers. The tasks are reproduction (Corkin, 1974, Mason, Katz, and Wicklund, 1975), successive same-different matching (Singer, 1979; Singer,
Lappin, and Allen, Note 4, Tallal, 1980), and delayed recognition with
tachistoscopic stimulus presentation (Manis and Morrison, Note 5). In fact,
memory for order is the major thing distinguishing poor from good readers
in these tasks. The reproduction and same-different matching data show very
little difference as a function of reading ability when item identities have to
be remembered but their order of occurrence does not. In the delayed
recognition task, poor readers are worse at both kinds of memory, but the
disadvantage is larger when order is important. Thus a more accurate claim
would be that reading ability is related to the ability to maintain ords over
time, as proposed by the more specific serial order hypothesis. Since Sihgers
successive matching experiments showed similar results for visual and auiditory
sequences, this relation May hold for both spatial and temporal order;. How
might the ability to deal with these two kinds of order figure in the reading
process?
ci
Sputial order and reading

Maintaining spatial order could potentially be important to reading at two

levels. Readers might have to keep straight the spatial arrangement of letters
during word recognition and they might have to keep straight the spatial
arrangement of words or phrases during sentence comprehension. Data on
eye movements by skilled adult readers (Rayner, 1978) indicate that useful
visual information is usually obtained from a rather small area during each
fixation, some 3 to 4 character spaces to the left and 8 to 10 spaces to the
Crowder
(1979) has recently argued that in cases where the stimuUare already known in a generic
sense, such as familiarwords OXletters, item and order information are the same thing but on different
scales or at different levels of hierarchy. For example, item information requiresone to know that X
occurred in List 3 but not in Lists 2 or 4, while order information requiresone to know that X occurred in Position 6 of List 3 but not in Positions S or 7. Even if item information does turn out to be
reducibleto orderinformation for some theoreticalpurposes, however, the distinction is still important
to readingif people show differential facili@ with information at the two levels of the hierarchy.

Building theoriesof reading ability

85

right of the fixation point. The average saccade length is about the same
distance to the: right, 8 to 10 spaces. Tayior (1965) found that the mean
number of fixations per 100 words of text doesnt go below 100 until tenth
or eleventh grade (average age 16 to 17 years) and is still around 90 among
college readers. Data like these imply that people often fixate most of the
words they read, especially after regressions are taken into account. As a
rough approximation, then, spatial order is probably most important in the
recognition of individual words. Multiword constituents involve the concatenation of information gained from successive fixations, confounding the
need to maintain spatial order with the need to maintain temporal order.
The major question regarding a relation between spatial order and reading
ability is therefore concerned with the role of spatial order in word
recognition.*
Estes (1975) showed that in the immediate report of briefly presented
letter strings, errors of location or transposition are common, such as saying
that P occurred in the second rather than the first position of the string
PJMRL. The memory requirements of tachistoscopic report are not especially
large, since the strings are usually of word length and report usually begins
within a second after the stimulus has been removed from view. Moreover,
transposition errors occur even when the subject is cued to give only the
letter that appeared in a particular position. On this basis one might begin to
bonder whether discrimiibating order initially rather than maintaining it
afterwards could be a difficulty in processing letter strings.
Chambers (1979) discovered that people performing the lexical decision
task took longer to reject nonwords that differed from a word by the order
of two adjacent letters than nonwords that c :uld not be turned into a word
by transposition. In her procedure the stimulus remained in view until the
response was executed, so the transposition effect cannot be assigned to
short-term memory in any very reasonable way. Therefore discrimination of
the order of letters influences the perceptual recognition of printed words.
Mason (1980; Note 6) reports that reading comprehension scores are more
strongly related to saying where in a brief display a letter occurred than to
saying what letter it was. Thus there is evidence to suggest that reading ability
and speed or efficiency at resolving letter location and order during word
recognition are associated. This information processing &ill fa& within the
*The role of information gained from the periphery is not yet completely understcod, but it does
appear that some rather gross information, such as word length, is obtained from farther to the right
than 10 character spaces. Such Information has been shown by Rayner to influence recognition of
words during the next fixation, ln which the charactersthat had been peripheralbecome foveal. It
may be, then, that spatial order is almost never complete& unconfounded from temporal order,
except perhaps in the first fixadon on a new line of print.

86

Thoms H. Carr

of skills held to be important by the visual discrimination theories of

reading failure.
E&es has uncovered a partial solution to the problem of resolving letter
order. He found that transposition errors were less frequent in orthographically regular strings than in random strings and concluded that the word
superiority effect found in a variety of perceptual tasks stems from the use
of knowledge about acceptable spelling patterns to help with lhe processing
of letter order. Subsequent tachistoscopic studies have obtained an advantage
for wrrds and orthographically regular pseudowords when subjects had only
to say which of a small, prespecified set of target letters had occurred anywhere in a letter string (Car-r,Lehmkuhle, Kottas, Astor-Stetson, and Arnold,
1976; Spector and Purcell, 1977). This shows that orthographic structure
facilitates letter identification as well as letter location. If orthographic
structure can aid in the discrimination of both item and order information,
one should ask whether reading ability is related to knowledge of orthographic structure and skill at using it. In answering this question, discussion
will move from primary visual processes to a consideration of secondary
feedback mechanisms, and then to translation from visual to phonological
information. In the next section, then, we will move from the domain of the
visual discrimination theories to the domain of the recoding theories.
domairz

Is orthographic knuwledge related to reading ability?

Knowfedge of orthographic structure comes in two forms, and their possible

effects ought to be considered separately. First, there is knowledge of orthography as a visual structure, the ilcceptable spelling patterns that can be seen
as combinations of letter shapes on the page, Second, there is knowledge of
spelling-tosound correspondence, the set of mapping rules for pronouncing
the spelling patterns.j Not all the words of the English language conform to
these two kinds of orthographic regularity (though there are languages, such
as Finnish, in which conformity is nearly perfect). In English, at least, a
substantial ;ilnount of ungeneralizsble knowledge about specific words is
3There is considerable controversy over how these mapping rules are represented in the mind and
what kind of mechanism makes use of them. Some theorists assume that people know at some level
what amounts to an ordered list of rules that are independent of the 4readyastablished internal
lexicon. Others, notably Brooks and Miller (1979) and Glushko (19791, maintain that people have
instead a set of algorithms or heuristics for pronouncing a new string of letters by analogy to simihrly
spelled words accessed in the lexicon. Whatever kind of mechanism embodies the genera&able
spelling-tomund relations of a Lnguage, it appears to be separate from the internallexiconitself.
Performanceon words and unfamiliarpseudowords can be manipulated independently in tachistoscopic
recognition under conditions in which subjects have been shown to rely primarily on phonological
recodings to support their responses (Carr,Davidson and Hawkins, 1978).

Building theories of rending abihty

87

required to supplement the structural knowledge that can be applied to large

numbers of strings. It appears that both skill at using visual regularity and
skill at using spelling-to-sound regularity vary with reading ability, while the
use of word-specific knowledge does not.
A series of experiments using the physical same-different matching task
with simultaneously presented ietter strings, which has been shown to depend
upon visual stimulus information rather than phonological or semantic
recodings (Baron, 1975; Barron and Henderson, 1977; Pollatsek, Well, and
Schindler, 1975), indicates that orthographic regularity facilitates word
procening in the visual system (Carr, Posner, Pollatsek, and Snyder, 1979;
Carr, Brown, Myers and Koons, Note 7). The right experiments have not
been done to say for sure whether poorer readers benefit as much as better
readers from orthographic structure in visual tasks. Results from tachistoscopic reports and from visual starch, however, are suggestive. Frederiksen
(Note 1) found that good readers were more accurate than pcor readers at
reporting orthographically accepta,ble bigrams from a briefly presented array.
The difference was larger for low-probability acceptable bigrams than for
bigrams that were both acceptable and quite likely to occur. Jackson and
McClelland (1979), on the other hand, found no relation between reading
ability and reporting random letters. Mason (1975) obtained a similar patEEm
in the ability to determine whether a target letter was present in strings that
varied in single-letter positional frequency, which is one component of
orthographic regularity. Good _-rl- were helped when either the targelt or
the distracters occurred at positions in the string at which they were lik.ely
to occur in an English word of the same length. Poor readers showed neither
benefit. Masonsdata indicate that differences between good and poor readers
in visual search time are smallest when the letter strings are most discrepcant
from English spelling patterns dnd increase as structural predictability
increases. Massaro and Taylor (Note 2) have recently replicated Masons
Wndings concerning single letter positional frequency and extended them to
another component of orthographic structure, constraints on letter sequencing as defined by Venezky (1970a).
A problem with these studies is that both tachistoscopic report and visual
search are susceptible to influence by events outside of or subsequent to
visual encoding, and the extent to which nonvisual processing actually affects
the results of these two tasks has not been calculated. Though phonological
recoding or short-term memory could conceivably be the sourse of the
relation between reading ability and tachistoscopic report, Maans visual
search findings are not easily explained in terms of recoding or memory
differentials. They may be due, as Mason argues, to differences among readers
in visual code formation. If not, they are most likely due to differences in

88

Thomas H. Carr

looking strategies that are controlled by orthographic constraints on the

targets probable location. In either case, it would be an aspect of O~Ographic knowledge and its use to facilitate the accrual of visual information
that is reliably related to reading ability in. Masons experiment and its
extension by Massaro and Taylor.
The evidence on spelling-to-sound regularity is more easily interpreted. A
multitude of studies have shown that poorer readers are slower and less
accurate at pronouncing unfamiliar but orthographically regular pseudowords
(mard, dake, leb, throp) but differ Pittle from better readers at pronouncing
very familiar real words (e.g., Calfee, Venezky, and Chapman, 1969; Firth,
1972; $;dSOii, 1978; Perfetti and Hogaboam, 1975; Frederiksen, Note 1).
Thus poor readers are in good shape when well-practiced knowledge about
specific words can be used to gain a pronunciation, busi at a disadvantage
when gc:~eralizable or rule governed knowledge must be brought to bear.
As me&oned in describing the single-factor theories, some investigators
attribu;c poor readers problems with phonological recoding to a short-term
memory deficit. For example, Jorm (1979) argues that the child must be
able to remember the phonemes which result from applying each graphemephoneme correspondence rule and the order in which the phonemes are to
be output. He must also remember which letters of the word he has already
analyzed so that he will avoid going over 1ettGrs which have already been
accounted for, or omitting strings of letters which have not. (p. 25).
It does seem plausible that short-term memory limitations could play a
role in determining success at rule-governed spelling-to-sound translation.
But for several reasons remembering the letters and the individual phonemes
produced from the letters is probably the least of the poos readers worries.
There is considerable evidence that the concept of what a phoneme is gives
children great difficulty, and that isolating phonemes from the speech signal
is very hard (Gleitman and Rozin, 1977; Rozin and Gleitman, 1977). Kindergartners and poor first and second grade readers often have trouble deciding
whether a word contains a particular sound or even whether two words
rhyme, and the ability to manipulate and make judgments about the sound
of letters and words is still correlated with comprehension-weighted reading
speed among college students (Jackson and McClelland, 1979).4 Thus,
4Jackson and McCJelhrnd(1979) argue that the basic information processing tasks that they found
to account for independent variance in readingability share the need to activate higher-ordermemory
codes for perceptual input quickly and accurately. From this they conclude that the speed of accessing
higher-order cods+ especially phonological codes, is the major factor distinguishing among readersof
varying ability. However, Jackson and McClellandstasks require manipulation and comparison of
phonological codes after they have been activated, and we have already seen that poor readersdo not
differ much from good readers in the time and accuracy needed to pronounce very famihar words for
(continued on facing page)

Building :I tories of reading ability

09

readers, especially young beginning readers, differ substantially in phonemic

awareness, and differences in phonemic awareness correlate with rt;ading
achievement (Golinkoff, 1978).
Becoming phonemically aware, however, does not solve the problem of
spelling-to-sound translation. Rules for mapping between phonemes and
letters are extremely complex. The vast majority are conditional, depending
on such things as the position of the letter in a string, other surrounding:
letters, the presence or absence of a silent signal letter, and even the derivational history or usual syntactic function that the string containing the letter
miP&t have (Gibson and Levin, 1975; Gleitman and Rozin, 1977; Venezky,
197Oa, 6). Conditional rules are notorioudy hard in concept %rmation tasks
anti there are large individual differences among children in how rapidly
conditional rules are learned (Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin, 195 6 ; Stevenson,
1972). Therefore mastering and applying the rules of spelling-to-sound translation are tough tasks (Barron, 1979; Doehring, 1976; Gibson and Levin,
1975). Whats worse, the rules alone will not yield enough completely accurate
pronunciations for a reader to get by, so children must learn to coordinate
the rules with word-specific knowledge (Glushko, 1979; Venezky, 1970a)
All of this means that getting phonemes and phoneme clusters to begin with
could pose a much bigger problem than remembering them once they have
been obtained.
Finally, putting phonemes together into a pronunciation is difficult for
children and is also associaisd with reading skill (Golinkoff, 1978). Chall,
Roswell, and Blumenthal (1963) found that the ability to blend three
phonemes into a syllable correlates as highly as 0.6 with reading achievement
during the first four grades of school. Blending errors among poor readers
often involve a failure to completely drop the schwa from consonants when
attempting to combine them with vowels, even when the sequence of
consonant/schwa and vowel sounds is produced in the right order (Gleitman
and Rozin, 1977; Venezky, 1972). The limits on blending seem to be set by
the ability to combine phonemes that cannot be pronounced correctly in
isolation, not by the ability to keep their order straight (Gleitman and Rozin,
1977).
One has to conclude from this discussion that remembering the raw
materials is only a small part of spelling-to-sound translation. Several comwhich a well-learned, directly activatable phonological code already existsin memory. Thus Jackson and
McClellandsdata seem more consistent at present with the hypothesis that poor readerslack phonological analysis skills than the hypothesis that they suffer from slow access to stored higher order
codes. It is possible that some of the evidence that has been taken to indicate a deficiency in code
activation is confounded by differences among readers in how well-learned are the directly activable
codes. Degree of learning will often vary with reading ability unless stimuli are carefully selected,
because good readers spend more time reading than poor readers.

90

i%ommH. Curr

ponents of the process other than short-term memory have been shown to be
reliably related to reading ability, as claimed by the recoding theorists.

What about memory for the temporal order of words rather than phonemes?

Here is one place where differences in short-term memory could be very

important to differences in reading ability. Kleiman (1975) and Levy (1978)
have demonstrated that engaging in activities that tie up the speech production apparatus disrupts sentence comprehension, even though Kleiman working with ad&s and Barron and Baron (1977) working with first graders
found that judgments about the meanings of individual familiar words were
not disrupted by concurrent speech activity. Levy (1978) summarizes the
available data by saying that these activities interfere with phonological
recoding and short-tenm memory (see also Perfetti, Note 8). While phonological codes are not always needed for access to word meanings, they do
prove useful as a memory medium to support comprehension requjring
accurate maintenance of word order or close attention to full information
content. Since the evidence cited earlier shows that good ,and poor readers
often differ in their ability to maintain the order of auditory or phonological
sequences, detailed comprehension may suffer among poor readers because
of a specific problem with short-term memory for word order. Other arguments along these lines have been laid out by Baddeley (1979) and Ferfetti
and Lesgold (1977). The conclusion is supported by Caramazza and Zurifs
(1976) work with brain damaged patients who show large short-term memory
deticits but reasonabiy good long-term storage. Caramazza and Zurif found
that these patients were quite capable of comprehending contrasts between
nonreversible, active and passive sentences, where there is really only one
sensible reading given the component parts of the sentence, but failed when
the sentences were reversible. Reversibility makes strict maintenance of word
order necessary for accurate understanding. A similar deficit was found
among deaf readers by Scholes, Cohen, and Brumfreld (1978). These investigators agreed with Conrads argument that the absence of phonological coding
in short-term memory was responsible for the problem.
Though the above position on phonological coding is sensible, it is based
largely on differences between good and poor readen; observed in several
kinds of short-term memory tasks that often bear little similarity to reading.
One might wonder whether these memory differences would actually occur
in the reading of connected text. Ferfetti and Lesgold (1977) have adapted
Waugh and N9l;mans (1965) probe recall technique to this question. At
various points in the mum of reading a passage, tird and fourth grade

Building theories of read&g ability

91

subjects were interrupted by the presentation of a probe word that had

occurred either 4 or 7 words earlier in the passage. The subjects job was to
recall
the worci that had followed immediately after the probe word in the
text. If the probe occuiyed 4 words back in the text, then 3 words intervened
between target and time of test. If the probe occurred 7 wcrds back, then 6
words intervened between target and time of test. This procedure does not
completely separate order memory from item memory, but it places a definite
premium on maintaining order. Resillts showed that when subjects read
silently, good readers enjoyed a 4.5% advantage over poor readers with 3
intervening words and an 18.0% advantage with 6 intervening words. Thus
poor readers appear to forget the wording of sentences faster than do good
readers in this probe recall task with connected text as the stimulus material.
Of course, the probe recall technique requires a type of very complex
memory performance that people never have to do while reading outside the
laboratory. One could legitimately ask whether some simpler memory judgment, such as forced.=choice recognition, might not be a more appropriate
test. Though alleviating some of the complexity of the memory measurement
task itself-which
could magnify differences among readers beyond their
normal proportions-- recognition would seem to move further away from
the actual memory demand+ of ongoing comprehension than recall. When
one forgets the beginning of an involved sentence or paragraph by the time
one reaches the end, it is a failure of recall. The forgotten material may or
may not seem familiar when one I~ Mns to the beginning and rereads the
passage, but that judbnent is essentially irrelevant to the memory failure
that interrupted comprehension and caused the regression in the first place.
Thus tradeoffs must continually be made between unwanted perturbations
of the reading process introduced by complex measurement techniques and
unwanted misrepresentations caused by the choice of some other technique
that unfortunately measures the wrong thing. This is not intended either to
defend or to attack Perfetti and Lesgolds use of probe recall-rather,
their
experiment provides a good opportunity to bring up a pervasive difficulty
that faces all researchers in the area. However, it ought to be noted at this
point that the size of the poor readers disadvantage in Perfetti and Lesgolds
data may be exaggerated by the complexity of the procedures used to
measure it.
At least two different ways of reducing or eliminating poor Weaders
deficits in short-term memory performance have been reported in the literature, and looking at them1 briefly will hc!p to illustrate more clearly the
nature of the poor readers Imemory
problem. Torgeson and Goldman (1977)
gave good and poor second-grade readers a task in which the experimenter
poiated one-by-one to each of seven line drawings of common objects

on a page of a booklet, waited 15 seconds with the childs

showed the same seven objects arranged in a new random
on the next page of the booklet. The child was asked to point to thr
in the same order as the experimenter-a
test of the childs memor;
poral order. The good readers were considerably better than the poor
at this task, but the difference was almost eliminated when the childasked to name each object aloud as the experimenter pointed to it.
and Goldman argued that naming the objects aloud enhanced the
verbal rehearsal during the 15-second interval, and that the
ader advantage occurred because of a metamnemonic differstrategy. The good readers were more likely to spontaneously
e absence of the requirement to label than were the poor readers.
up this argument, Torgeson and Goldman reported that observabl::
ofrehearsal varied in exactly the same way as reproduction accuracy
ups in both task conditions.
n and Goldmans argument may be true, but a metamnemonic
difference zems unlikely to explain Perfetti and Lesgolds abilitymemory for text, This is because it seems unlikely that
text they have already read while they are in the
text. Yet Perfetti and Lesgold report a very similar
in their p_&e recall task. When subjects read the text aloud rather
ntly, memory was generally better for everyone, and the advantage
readers over poor readers was reduced from 4.5% to 3.5% with 3
and from 18% to 9.5% with 6 intervening words.
for Perfetti and Lesgolds findings might be found ir.:the
good and poor readers will engage in phonological
3 r?ber than the likelihood that phonological codes
once they have been activated. Generally speatig, lists of
onologically similar items are harder to maintain accurateiy
ry task than lists of acoustically or phonologically dis1964; Crowder, 1976). Shankweiler and Lieberman
etrimental effects of phonological similarity were
good readers. The difference held whether stimuli
visually or auditorily. Mark, Shankweiler, Lieberman, and
reported that false alarm rates to distracters that rhymed
in a recognition memory test for words were also lower for
readers. Stimuli in this memory test were read by the
Shea (1979) have recently extended the finding to runauditorily presented words: poor readers made fewer
g distracters than good readers. Despite the paucity of
f&e alarms among poor readers, they nevertheless

Building theories of reading ability

93

made more semantically-based false alarms (to synonyms of target words)

than did good readers. When the stimuli were changed to auditorily presented
pseudowords, phonological false alarms by poor readers increased, but good
readers remained more susceptible than the poor readers to phonologicallybased confusions.
These data suggest that poor readers are less likely than good readers to
employ phonological coding in situations where memory is important. Since
phonological encoding is commonly believed to be short-term memorys
best hedge against loss of order information, the poor reader3 difficulty with
the maintenance of order may be at least in part a rather direct consequence
of deficits in phonological recoding, as Perfetti and Lesgold have argued in
their hysteresis hypothesis. However, both Byrne and Sheas and Shankweiler
and Liebermans poor readers showed less reliance on phonological codes
even when the codes were provided for them via auditory stimulus presentation. Thus the problem does not lie completely in skill at spelling-to-sound
translation. Poor readers appear to be less sensitive to phonological codes or
less facile with them in general than good readers. Byrne and Sheas comparison of words with pseudowords indicates that the problem is exacerbated
when semantic codes are available that could possibly distract the poor
readers attention away from the phonological codes that he or she is already
having trouble in using.
But can deficiencies in the utilization of phonological codes be the entire
explanation of the comprehension difficulties that remain after problems
with visual code formation have been taken into account? Two comprehension-related phenomena that bear a much less obvious relation to memory
maintenance are the ability to identify syntactic relations among words and
the ability to use syntactic and semantic context as an aid to recognizing
words currently under perceptual scrutiny. There are experiments to indicate
that both of these skills vary with reading ability. Discussion of these experiments will shift the focus from data-driven processing to a consideration of
the kinds of processes emphasized by the topdown deficit theories.
Syntactic knowledge and use of context
In Guthries (1973) study of comprehension, poor readers were less able than
good readers to choose a word from a set of three alternatives that would
appropriately fYl a blank in an incomplete sentence. This occurred even
though the two groups were equally proficient according to the GatesMcGinitie Vocabulary Test at recognizing the words from which the sentence
frames were composed. HOW should Guthries finding be interpreted? One
possibility has already been considered, that poor readers may have had more

difficulty than good reader&in remembering thy words long enough to integrate their meanings into a composite understanding Of the sentence. s%lath,

short-term memory hypothesis could be advanced, and this has been done
(JOT, 1979). However, there ase some other po
rles experiment,
Four types of btnks had to be filled
requiring either a noun, a modifier, a verb, or a function word. For each
blank, the three alternatives were a completely appropriate word, 8
semantically incongruous word from the same form class, and a word
from ++different form class whose meaning was related to or generally
consistent with the gist of the sentence. If poor readers failed in this
task primarily because of short-term memory limitations, then the root
difficulty would be a tendency to scramble word order rather than to
forget words entirely, as indicated in previous sections. This would
interfere with the assessmznt of syntax, but the meanings of individual
words would still be active together to give a global impression of
semantic cantent. Short-term memory failure, then, should lead poor
readers to choose the syntactically inappropriate but semantically
related distractor more often than the good readers. However, there
was no difference in the relative likelihoods of syntactic
semantic
errors-just
a main effect of reading ability. As Guthrie s
steed, this
implies that the poor readers were trying to use the same kinds of syntactic
and semantic processing strategies as the gsod readers, but using them less
well. Therefore poor readers may not be as sensitive in general to syntactic
and semantic constraints on text, rather than failing to respond m particular
to information based on word order as a short-term memory hypothesis
would predict.
If this notion were correct, then good and poor readers mi
more on measures of the ability to use context as an aid in processing
current and upcoming text than on measures of memory for text they
have already processed. Using Sachs (1967) recognition paradigm, Lovett
(197% has compared good and poor readers detection of lexical, syntactic,
and semantic changes in sentences that were successfully read aIoud in
connected discourse. She found no differences between the groups. WhiIc
this may me&n that her materials were too easy to tax her subjects sufficiently, it may also mean that relatively short-term memory for laentance
content does not always discriminate among readers who vary in skiIl,
This conclusion is not necessarily at odds with the idea that reading comprehension may ait times be limited by the ability to maintain exact word
order, since Levys work indicated that only certain kinds of comprehension
and memory tasks place strict enough demands on short-term memory
for quch differences among readers to show up.

Buildhag theories of reading ability

95

k for evidence that the use of syntactic or semantic context

is related to reading ability. Mackworth
readers -%th a series of sentence frames,
either a noun or a verb. The task was to complete
words printed above the sentence on the
atives were nouns grouped to one Fide of
e were verbs grouped to the uther aide.
ed that poor readers searched less selectively
rtion of time looking at words in
that the differ&ce in eye movement patterns occurred
aders took longer to tell the nouns and the verbs apart,
they knew what they were looking for as well as the good
would convert Ma&worths result into more evidence for a
ition instead of syntactic knowledge. Cromer
readers who had no ohviou- deficit in
of comprehension when the words in the
sentences were grouped according to their syntactic phrase structure rather
than presented with the usual even spacing between words. The same poor
readers displayed equivalent comprehension relative to normal presentation
when sentences were given word by word on a scroll. In contrast, phrase
strilcture grouping had no effect on good readers but word by word presentation hurt them. Cramers data show that some poor readers have a tendency
that good readers do not have to treat sentences as stdngs of independent
words, and that this tendency results from a failure to identify and exploit
syntactic relations. Therefore reading ability seems to be related to differences in the spontaneous application of syntactic knowledge. This conclusion is complemented by Graesser, I-Ioffman, and Clarks (1980) finding that
sentence reading times were influenced much more among poor readers than
ders by decreases in syntactic predictability, where yredictalatsd from the form class transition probabilities de&red in
Stevens and I?umelh s (1975) Augmented Transition Network grammar.
Syntactic processing in general may give poor readers trouble.
8emantCknowledge and use

of

context

What about semantic context? Most of the data on this yuestion come from
primed lexical decision and pronunciation. In these tasks some kind of context consisting of words or sentences precedes a word to which the subject
has to respond. This context is either meaningfully related to the imperative
WCXIand therefore appropriate, or unrelated and therefore inappropriate.

96

Thornas

I-3, Cam

A difference in response time for the two conditions demanstrtites sensitivity

to meaningful relations between the context and the imperative word. This
differc:nce can be called the total semantic facilitation. Sometimes a third
condition is included in which the imperative word i? preceded by a semantically neutral warning signal. When this is done the total facilitation can be
divided into the benefit that results from an appropriate context and the
cost that results from an inappropriate context. Following Posner and Snyder
(1975) and McLean and Shulman (1978), benefit may arise entirely from
automatic spreading activation while cost indicates the involvement of an
attended expectation. With this terminology established, let us turn to the
data.
At least one experiment has obtained the same amount of total facilitation for good and poor readers (Merrill, Sperber, and McCauley, in press).
However, the more common result is that poor readers show greater total
facilitation (e.g., Schvaneveldt, Ackerman, and Semlear, 1977; Wet+ 2nd
Stanovich, 1978). This is usually taken to mean that poor readers are st least
as sensitive to semantic context as better readers and perhaps more s *lsiti,ve.
A couple of recent investigations, though, show that the picture oeco~lies
L
more complicated when costs and benefits are calculated.
Becker (Note 9) reports that people performing primed lexical cecisldns
can be categorized: some enjoy substantial benefit from appropriate c,ontexts
and suffer very little cost from inappropriate contexts, while othe IS Elkffer
cost without showing much benefit. When tested for reading speed, people in
the benefit category are relatively unaffected by increases in passage difficulty. People in the cost category ;ue slowed considerably. Susceptibility to
disruption by passage difficulty is not necessarily the same thing as Teading
ability measured on a comprehension test, but the two probably have quite a
bit in common. Beckers findings suggest that good readers gain fr. n meaningful context through automatic prooesses while poor readers use context in
a more attention demanding, predictive i&ion.
Perfetti, Goldman, and Hogaboam (! 979) report some data with which
this speculation can be tested. Perfetti and his colleagues found that words
were pronounced faster at the ends of sentences telling a story than at the
ends of random unrelated lists, and poor readers showed a bigger difference
between the two context conditions than good readers. Next a cloze procedure was added to the story version of the pronu;lciation task. Just before
each imperative word was presented the subject guessed what the word
would be. Guesses were scored as correct, incorrect but appropriate, or
inappropriate.
Before considering the pronunciation latencies, the circumstances should
be established under which each kind of guess would pr&ably be made. An

Building theories of reading ability

97

inappropriate guess is evidence that the context was not comprehended well
enough to understand what kind of word was required. An appropriate guess
is evidence that the context was comprehended and constraints on acceptable
words realized. Finally, a correct guess is evidence that these constraints
were so strong that the set of acceptable words was narrowed to a very small
number. Table 1 gives pronunciation times for the actual imperative word as
a function of the kind of guess made about the word. Times are expressed
both as absolute latencies and as percentages of the latency when the guess
was inappropriate. The latter measure corrects for the large overall difference
in pronunciation times between the good and poor readers. It is clear that
good readers were helped ahnost as much by a context from which they
could make an appropriate guess as by a context flom which they could make
a fully correct guess. Poor readers, though, were only helped substanti4ly
by contexts fram which they could guess exactly what word was going
to be presented. Thus good readers do appear to utilize context automatically with little involvement of attention. As long as the context is
sufficient to put the good readers into the general semantic hailpark, a lot of
facilitation will resanlt. Poor readers do not seem to get much of this automatic support from context, but rely instead on attended computations that
help if they are right but hurt i thev are wrong in any way. Reading ability,
then, ;iyspears to be related to variation along a dimension of cognitive
flexibility. The dimension ranges from the automatic utilization of very
general constraints on acceptability to reliance on single-valued predictions
that lead the reader down a costly garden path if they do not work out.

Treble1.

Prsnunciation latencies for good and poor fifth grade readers as a function of
L*lozep:rj?mnance EnPerfetti, Goldman, and Hogaboam 3 (I 9 79) experiment.
Type of Guess Made in Cloze Task
Correct

Incorrect but
Appropriate

Inappropriate

--_
Good Readers
Absolute Latency
Percent of Latency after
Inappropriate Guess
Pour Readers
Absolute Latency
Percent of Latency after
Inappropriate Guess

824 msec

656 mstx

706 msec

79.6%

85.7%

100%

792 msec

972 msec

1OCclmsec

79.2%

97.2%

:oO$o

98

Thomas H. Carr

Con tex t-sensittvc encoding

SO far the discussion of semantic context has been limited to predictin

upcoming
words from what has already been read. Semantic relationshi
can also have a substantial influence after initial word reco
are well underway. For example, Tulving and Thompson (1943), Barclay,
Brasford, Franks, hTcCarrel1,and Nitsch (19941, and Anderson and &tony
(1995) have shown that semantic context can lead to chameleon-like shifts
in the meaning of word co:lcepts encoded into memory. The perceived sense
of a word such as shovel or lady will vary from phrase to phrase in
which it is used (the steam shovel cIersusthe toy shovel or the little
old lady versus the first lady of the land). A particularly extreme kind of
context-sensitive encoding or encoding specificity occurs with homographs,
in which two or more very different meanings are associated with a single
dogs bark or river bank versus First
spelling (tree bark V~I:VAS
National Bank). Current research suggests that when a homograph is read,
all 0: its meanings may become temporarily active (Conrad, 1974; Killion,
1978). A selection prccess then chooses one meaning and suppresses the
others, basing its choice on the u priori frequencies with which various meanings are likely to occur in conjunction with the actual semantic demands of
the context (Killion, 1978; Schvanevsldt, Meyer and Becker, 1996; Simpson,
in press). The selection mechanism determines the sense that is consciously
perceived and ultimately the sense that is encode into memory. Such a
selection process may underlie all encoding specificity phenomena, though
its consequences are most pronounced in the case of homographs.
Merrill, Sperber, and McCauley (Note 10) have recently presented evidence
that good ana poor readers differ in the efficiency of context-sensitive encoding processes. Fifth graders were shown either a single word or a sentence
context, then a target word printed in colored ink. FoBowing a Stroop procedure developed by Warren (1972) and Conrad (1974), the task was to
nar se the color of the ink. A single-word context such as cat could be
followed by one of two related targets such as fur or claw, or else by an
unrelat,ed target. Good and poor readen alike were slower to name the color
of both related targets than the color of the unrelated target, The critical
manipulation involved the sentence contexts, which ended with the same
wor& that were ust d as single-word contexts. Each sentence was constructed
to be semantically appropriate to the sense of its last word that was emphasized by cme of the targets, and semantically inappropriate to the sense of its
last word that was emphasized by the other target. To carry on with the
cat example, one sentence context was The girl touched the cat, which
was appropriate to the target word fur, while the other was The girl

Buildingtheoriesof readingability

99

t the cat, which was appropriate to the target word claw. Given
cot had primed both ccfur and %law when presented in isolation,
the
of the sentencecontext condition would reflect rather directly
on of the context-based selection mechanism. Results showed
that for good readers, the semantically appropriate context-target combination produeed interference relative to an unrelated combination, but the
inappropriate combination did not. For poor readers, however, both combinations produced interference, just as cat had produced interference for
both &furand claw In the single-wotd context condition. Thus contextsensitive selection of a particular sense of the la& word of the sentence
seemed to characterize the performance of the good readers, while unselective
activation of all senses seemed to characterize the performance of the poor
readers. If comprehension and memory depend on integrating the meanings
of constituents at various levels of analysis into a coherent semantic repre
sentation of a text, this difference in context-sensitive encoding could figure
importantly in individual differences in reading ability as measured ny tests
of comprehension and memory.
A summary of reading-@&d individual differences in cognition

To put a brief end to a long argument, comprehension performance is reliably

related to a large number of information processing skills, many of which
have been the basis for single-factor heories of individual differences in
reading ability. Among these skills are discrimination of letter location and
order during perceptual recognition, use of orthographic regularity as an aid
to perceptual encoding and decision making, use of spelling-to-sound regularity in phonological recoding and pronunciation, memory for the order of a
sequence of words, spontaneous identification and exploitation of syntactic
relations, flexibility in the use of semantic context as a guide to prediction,
and specificity in the use of semantic context as a guide to encoding. Were
the analyses carried beyond the bounds of single sentences, the list might
possibly grow to include such things as facility with anaphoric reference
(Fmderiksen, Note 1l), knowledge of the usual structure of stories and other
kinds .of text (Baker and Stein, 1978; Graesser, Hoffman, and Clark, 1980),
or the propensity to supplement explicit textual information by drawing
inferences (Baker and Stein, 1978; Brown, et aZ., 1977; Paris and Lindauer,
1976). Therefore individual differences in reading ability may well be
multiply determined-they
are unlikely to be traced to differences in any
one factor, no matter how crucial that factor seems to be to the readihg
process. At least the podbthty of more complexity must be admitted to

100

ThomasH. Can-

conceptions of reading skill than the single-factor theories have done, however regretfully one might give up the many satisfaction9 afforded by a simple
explanation.
Relative contributions of cognitive skills to reading performance
Demonstrating that good and poor readers differ on a large number of cog
nitive skills, however, does not finish the job thats necessary. We still need
to establish the relative contributions of individual differences in various
skills to individual differences in overall performance. There is not nearly as
much solid evidence on the relative importance of skill differences among
readers as there is on the existence of these differences. In the course of

looking at some of the most recent evidence, it will become necessary to

distinguish two rather different kinds of skills that could each be predictive
of reading comprehension: general information processing abilities and
specific mental operations as they have been developed within the task of
reading itself.
Evans [ 1979, (Carr and Evans, in press; Carr and Evans, Note 12)I has col-

lected data from which intercorrelations can be calculated among a number

of general measures of information processing, maturity of oral language,
and reading comprehension in first graders. She included tests of sequential
short-term memory, Piagetian class inclusion operations, pattern analysis and
predictive reasoning (Ravens Colored Progressive Matrices), multiplechoice
cloze performance (the comprehension subtest of the Stanford Achievement Tests, Primary Level 1), mean length of utterance in conversations with
an adult about a number of specified topics, syntactic complexity of utterances in the: same conversations (the Developmental Syntax Score of Lee and
Canter, X971), and sophistication at verbal description and storytelling
(called quality of expressive language and defined in detail in Carr and
Evans, in press).
Table 2 shows the relationship between these measures and reading comprehension, which was assessed by asking fact, inference, and vocabulary
questions about a series of short passages graded for difficulty (primer, first
grade, second grade). Shart-term memory, class inclusion, and predictive
reasoning all correlated positively with comprehension, and they also correlated positively among themselves. Multiple-choice cloze performance was
a much better simple predictor of comprehension than any of the nonreading
cognitive measures, capturing 846% of the variance in answering questions
about the reading passages with its correlation of +0.92, Correlations between
cloze performance and the measures of short-term memory, class inclusion,

Buildmgtheoriesof readingabili:ty

Table 2.

Correlation
with
Comprehension

101

Simplecorrelationsbetweencognitivemeaswesand readingcomprehension
amongfirst graders
cl;lss

fnclusion

Short-Term
Memory

Progressive
Matrices

MultipleChotce
Cloze

Mean Length
of Utterance

Developmental
Syntax Score

Quality of
Expressive
Language

+0.47*

+0.51*

+o 45

+0.92*

- 0.02

-0.27

+0.23

*p < 0.05.

and predictive reasoning were all much smaller than this (+0.44, +O.S1, and
tO.43, respectively), suggesting that cloze performance would remain substantially corlslated with reading comprehension even if the contributions
lrlade to both of these reading measures by the nonreading cognitive tests
were extracted.
While considering the research by Evans and Carr, we should examine the
approach itself as well as the data that were collected. The decision to test
for relations between fairly general information processing capacities and
reading comprehension rests on the assumption that in order to read, one
brings to bear a number of highly transferrable cognitive abilities that presumably underlie performance in many other intellectual activities as well.
These abilitiesexist independently of whether or not an individual ever learns
to read, though specific practice is necessary to get them to function at their
best in the service of reading as opposed to other tasks in which they might
be involved. How valid is this approach? The appreciable magnitude of the
correlations between reading comprehension and r Dnverbal short-term
memory, class inclusion relations, and predictive reasoning lends it credibility,
and it is one of only two approaches available if one wants to predict in
advance of reading experience how successful a learner is likely to be. The
other possibility is to provide the novice with a standardized amount of
reading instruction and measure how much learning results. Assessment of
teachability or learning potential was first suggested by Vygotsky (1926/
1962), and has been employed with good results by Siegler (1978) in research
on the development of reasoning and by Feuerstein (1979) in evaluation ansi
remediation of cognitive delay.
However, the much higher correlation observed between comprehension
and the more obviously reading-based cloze test indicates that the amount of
task-specific learning to be acquired is considerable. Once reading experience
has begun, one might therefore want to know how vtious task-specific performances are actually coming along, rather than now well they ought to be
coming along given the learners general inforrrd &ionprocessing abilities and

102

ThornasH.Carr

learning potential. In order to iind tkat out, one needs to supplement general
ability and learning potential assessment with a component skills analysis of

the particular task at hand. The first step in such an analysis is to specify the
component skills that make up the task, and the second is to determine which
of the specified skills could potentially be involved in determining individual
variation in the overall success of the task as a whole. These two steps have
been the major topic of the present paper. The third step is to determine !he
relative contribution to variation in overall success that is in fact made by
each skill or skill group. Two major kinds of strategies could be employ ed in
taking this third step, and I will describe an example of each.
One strategy is to look as carefully as possible at the fdll act of reading,
using skill inventories such as the one offered here to educate attention as to
what details of performance might be illuminating. By comparing characteristics of the text to changes in performance measures-for example, reading
time, miscues in oral production, or comprehension errors-one can infer
by judicious reference to the skill inventory just what aspects of the information processing requirements of reading seem to make the most difference to
success. Oral miscue analysis has been developed in detail by Goodman
(1973) and put to excellent use by Weber (1968, 1970) and Biemiller (1970).
This work is already well-known. As a further illustration of the stratogy, we
can look at an analysis of reading time done recently by Graesser, Hoffman,
and Clark (1980).
Passages were constructed that varied along six dimensions. Three of these
were considered to be part of the microstructure of the passage, and were
defined on individual sentences taken in isolation: the number of words in a
sentence, the number of propositions, and the proportion of words whose
syntactic form class was predictable. Propositions were identified by Kintschs
(1974) criteria-and syntactic predictability was calculated using Stevens and
Rumelharts (1975) Augmented Transition Network parsing system. Three
mo,;e dimensions were considered a part of the macrostructure of the
pas:;age, and were defined on relations between sentences: the number of
new argument nouns in a sentence, the familiarity of the topic discussed in
the passage, and the narrativity or story-ness of the passage. New argument
nouns were characters, objects, locations, or concepts appearing for the first
time (Chafe, 1972), while familiarity and narrativity were assessed from
subjects ratings. A widely circulated story with a cast of characters and a
plot, such as %YOWWhite and the Seven Dwarves, would be high in familiqrity and narrativity; an exposition conveying information on a relatively
obscure topic, such as Armadillos, would be low in both.
In two experiments, sentence reading times were collected from college
students who read 12 passages sentence by sentence using a self-paced pro-

Building theories of reading abi@

103

cedum:. Mctltiple
n andyses showed that together the six text
variables predicted
the total vtimce
in sentence reading time in the
first ~x~e~rnent an
the second, and that each of the variables except
syntactic p~di~tab~ity made a si
nt ~dependent contribution in both
experiments. Syntactic predictab
naily significant in one exveraged aca~ss the two experiments,
by narrativity (33.3%) and number
ment nouns accounted for another 2.5% of the
familiarity I A%, and syntactic predictability
outcome concerned the relative contributions
and propositional integration to the total time needed
ion. Reading the 2.42 words in the average proposition
contributed 164 msee per word or 397 msec, while integrating the information from the words into a proposition contributed only 148 msec more. It
would appear, then, that the processing of a proposition was hugely taken up
by word recognition. The integration process itself seemed to be accomplished
very rapidly (or else substantially in parallel with word recognition, implying
continuous integration of new information as it became available until the
proposition was completed. Graesser et al. seem to believe the former, but
the latter is also plausible.)
After the combined analyses, the subjects in each experiment were divided
into two groups according to reading speed. Mean reading time for an average
sentence of 12 words was 3.46 set for the faster group and 5.35 set for the
slower group. Though subjects were told they would be tested on the material, no test was actually given, Therefore reading ability was inferred from
reading speed. Multiple regression analysts were performed fQr each group
separately, and the slopes were compared for each variable. Results showed
that fast (good) and slow (poor) readers differed on all three microstructure variables but on none of the macrostructure varittbles. Averaged
across experiments, slow readers took 1.7 1 times longer to process a word,
2.22 times long&+rto integrate a proposition, and 6~33 f,tnes longer to deal
class relative to a predicted one. The
with a syntactic&y unpredicted
n cost and benefit of semantic context
latter result is much like the find
discussed earlier. This su sts that the mechanism by which context is used
to predict upcoming wo
perates upon syntactic and semantic constraints
similarly, and that poor readers may show more cost than good readers in
syntactic predictions as well as semantic predictions. To put these
findings in perspective, it ought to be noted that $he second eyneriment in
Graessers study included a manipulation of the readers expectations about
why they were reading the passages. Half were told they would be given a
multiple-choice test on the information in the passages and half were told

104 ThornasH.
Carr

they would be asked to write essays about them. This maniguhtioa

was
effective, producing differences in the contributions to reading time made by
all three macrostructure variables. It did not change the contributions OP
for different
microstructure variables. And despite the fact that read
s, it was still
purposes changed the pattern of macrostructure contribu
microstructure variables that distinguished fast from slow readers in the
experiment.
Looking at the relative importance of the three microstructure variables,
ater on
the difference in efficiency between good and poor readers was
both syntactic prediction and propositional integration than on word processing, but the time to process words was the biggest component of total
reading time in absolute terms. Taking that into account, it would appear
from the data of Graesser et al. that the largest part of the total reading time
difference between fast and slow readers at the college level is due to word
processing. That is to say, equating fast and slow readers on word processing
efficiency would do more to equate them on total reading time than Ghanging
any other single skill.
Some investigators have argued that the relative importance of word processing skills is greater among less experienced readers than among more
experienced readers (e.g., Calfee, Veneaky, and Chapman, 1969; Gibson and
Levin, 1975). If that wer2 true, then Graessers findings would lead to the
conclusion that the development of efficient word processing is critically
important -it is the largest single source of variation between fast and slow
college readers and it is an even larger contributor to reading ability a+ lower
grade levels. Therefore the next study to be described will sen e two purposes.
In addition to illustrating another st.:ategy by which the relative eo&ibutions of component skills could be pursued, it addresses in detail the twopart question of how much is contributed to reading comprehension sy skill
at word processing and what factors inCuence the development of that skill.
The study was done by Singer and Crouse (in press), who colIected independent measures on a number of reading-related tasks from a large group of
sixth graders. Thz tasks were discrimination of letter identity, phonemic
awareness and phonetic recoding, vocaFaularyknowledge, cloze performance,
and the Gates-McGinitie comprehension test. In addition, they administered
the Ravens Pro,gressiveMatrices, a measure of predictive reasoning. The data
were then analyzed using multiple regression.
TQs procedure for obtaining measures of predictor variables is quite
different from Graesser et ul, s. It is actually an extension of the research
approach evidenced in the extensive literature already reviewed concerning
differences between good and poor readers on individual cognitive ttisks.
Both Graesser et al. and Singer and Crouse wanted to estimate the impoF

Building theories of readingabitity

1%

tmcesfvariolls diffe~n~~~ amon readers in the abilitv to perform mental

required by reading. Graesser et ai. chose to do that
ius materials that they thought would make several
operations easier or harder
tting subjects to perform al1 operaether in as natural a way
ossibfe, and looking for effects of
materials on a summary measure of overdtl performance. Singer and Grouse
e same goal by extracting several proposed operations
process, embodying each in an independent task where
d be observed directly, and asking how strongly the direct
f skill at each operation related to a separate direct measurement
criterion task. The former approach has the virtue of ecoat it p~se~es to a greater extent the usual task environtal operations of interest must be carried out. The latter
approach has the virtue of speerfiability and control, in that it allows the
investigator to determine more directly the operation that is being observed
and to manipulate more systematically the way in which it must be carried
out. Because speeifiability and control are important to understanding how
each operation works while ecological validity is important to uriderstanding
how the operations fit into the complete performance, these are complementary strategies. They might best be viewed as converging operations (rather
than as competitors for the allegiance of researchers, for example).
Turning to the results of the investigation, simple correlations with comprehension w
+0.41 for the Progressive Matrices, +O.f 6 for letter discrimination, +0.3
r phonemic awareness arld phonetic recoding, +0.76 for
vocabulary knowIodge, and +-OS4for cloze performance. When the measures
were entered in that order into a multiple regression equation, vocabulary
knowledge with a standardized regression coefficient of +0.62 and cloze
performansc with a coefficient of +0.17 COII
tributes1 significantly to the
variance in comprehension scores.
Singer and Grouse then asked how the remaining information-proc;?ssing
tasks were related to the two direct predictors of comprehension. When
cloze performance was taken as a ctiterion variable, significant regression
eoeffrcients were obtains8 for vocabulary knowledge (H.39) and for a task
that did not directly predict comprehension, Progressive Matrices performance (t0.19). These relations indicate that if a reader knows a lot about
the words that might be used and can do well at predictive reasoning, then
the reader is likely to do well at the cloze task--a very sensible result.
Another regression analysis shofved that, like cloze performance, vocabulary
knowledge was also predicted by Progressive Matrices performance (+0.40),
and, in addition, by recoding skill (tO.40). This, too, seems to be a sensible
result. Much has been made about the role that recoding plays as a vocabulary

106

ThornasH. Carr

builder for the reading process. If a reader can pronounce an unfamiliar string
of letters, the word might be recognized by phonological reference to the
intern& lexicon even if that word does not yet possess an entry that has
become visually-addressable through repeated readings (Baron and Strawson,
1976; Carr, Davidson, and Hawkins, 1978; Carr and Evans, in press; Coltheart, 1978; Gibson and Lcvin, 1975; Rozin and Gleitman, 1977). A second
vocabulary builder for the reading process involves guessing a words meaning
from context, which probably depends in part on the competence at predictive reasoning that is tapped by Progressive Matrices performance.
The analyses conducted by Singer and Crouse, then, may have identified
a hierarchically organized set of interdependencies among several readingrelated information processing skills that could have substantial developmental and instructional implications for the acquisition of reading competence.
A rough sketch of this skill hierarchy is shown in Figure 1. Whether such a
model could stand up to empirical evaluation remains to be seen. Certainly
some of the relational parameters of the model would change with developmental level and reading experience -for inst:mce, among readers younger
than those who provided data to Singer and Crouse, such as the first graders
observed by Evans and Carr, predictive reasoning might be relatively less
L%portant and recoding relatively more important as predictors of comprehension (Calfee, Venezky, and Chapman, 1969; Doehring, 1976; Wanat,
1974). Among older readers such as the college c+~~
Yrrrdentsstudied by Graesser
et al., predictive reasoning might gain in relative importance, perhaps through
its task-specific instantiations in utilization of semantic and syntactic context.
In addition to the need for adaptation of the model to possible developmental changes, a number of cognitive performances in which readers have
been shown to vary are not represented at all in the skill hierarchy of Figure 1
(for example, visual discrimination of letter order, use of orthographic structure during visual code formation, short-term memory for word order, and
specificity of semantic encoding). Others are submerged in skills that we
already know to be complex skill groups --for example, phonemic awareness,
knowledge of spelling-to-sound translatiola rules, automaticity of the application of spelling-to-sound translation rules, and phonemic blending are all
submerged in recoding, while spontaneity and flexibility in the use of
syntactic context and flexibility in the use of semantic context are submerged
in cloze performance. Determining how these unrepresented and submerged skills might fit into the model constitutes a major &aIlenge. Since
the model as it stands is limited to individual differences in microstructure
processing, another major challenge would be to certify whether or not a
microstructure mo se1 is really sufficient to account for individual differences
in comprehension cf connected text. There is no guarantee that these chal-

Building theories oj reading ability

Figure 1.

107

A tentative model of the hierarchical relationsamong cognitive skillssupporting reading comprehension derived from the data of Singer and Crouse (in
press). Skills enclosed in ovaIs were direct predict srsof comprehension, while
skills enclosed in boxes were predictors of the direct predictors but not of
comprehension itself according to multiple regression analyses. Numbers
associated with arrows show the strength of prediction as defined by regression weights.

predlclwe

roasonmg

letter

idenhty

dlscrlmlnation

lenges could be met. It seems to me, however, that the class of hierarchical
skill models represented by the example in Figure 1 is a good class of models
to investigate more fully than we have done to date, and that a good way to
pursue them is through the converging application of research strategies like
those of Graesser, Hoffman, and Clark (1980) and Singer and Grouse (in
press).

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114

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JusquV ce jour la plupart cles thkories sur laptitude 1 la lecture nont propos6 quun seul facteur en
tam que source essentielle des differences individuelles. Laccord SW le facteur a et6 faible et parmi les
princiraux candidats propos& on trouve la discrimination visuelle, le recodage phonologique et
semantique, la memoire $ court terme et lutilisation du contexte linguistique. Dans cet article on
resume les theories i un seul facteur et on passe en revue la Wrature pour montrer quaucune thdone
~3un seul fxcteur ne peut dtre adiquate. La rCussite en lecture est correl%e i de multiples savoir-faire.
Parmi ceuxci les capacitds de: discriminer la place des lettres et leur ordre pendant la reconnaissance
perceptuelle. de nutihser la r&ularit8 orthographique que comme aide pour la formation dun code
visuel, dutiliser les r6gularitk entre appelation-sons dans le recodage phonologique, de m6moriser
larche des mots, didentifier spontakment les relations syntaxique et de pr6dire de facon simple 1
park du contexte syntaxique et s6mantique la spbificit6 co-rtextuelle dans lencodage dmantique.
On conclut a la nkessit6 dun mod&e complexe multifactcriel et otnprdsente certains essais ricents
pour rasscmbler les donndes contribuant $ un tel mod&, Trois auproches ont itd d&ies pour
identifier les facteurs pertinents pour la rdussite dans la lectu:r- Nvaluation des capacit& ginkles,
l%volution dcspotentialit& dapprentissage et lanalyse componenwlle des savoir-faire. Deux methodes
danalyse des savoir-faire sont pr&ent8es et on recommande de les utiliser dans des op6rations convergentes. Enfm on utilise les kultats de lanalyse des savoir-faire pour proposer un premier exemple
dune classe de meddles hiirarchiques de la capacite de lecture qui peut %tre 6tudi6 de facon develop
mentale.