The Psychology of Reading

The Psychology of Reading provides a fair and coherent overall picture of how reading is done and how it is best taught. It aims to relate reading to writing systems, analyze the process of reading from several viewpoints using research from diverse disciplines, and develop a model of reading to explain reading processes all the way from letter recognition to reading whole texts. The book describes how children learn to read in different scripts, by different methods, and at different ages. It discusses different components of reading-eye movements, letter and word recognition, sentence and prose reading, and so on, in beginning readers, in skilled or unskilled readers, as well as dyslexic readers. Brain-damaged patients with selective impairment of different components provide a ''natural laboratory'' to compare reading processes within one script as well as across different scripts. The more types of readers, scripts, and components examined, the better the picture of reading processes drawn. This book is a text for college students as well as a reference book for professionals in psychology, education, linguistics, and other related fields.