Individual Differences in the Cognitive Processes of Reading: II. Text-Level Processes

Abstract

For those who missed last issue's introduction to the Topical Review series, this new monthly feature is designed to provide a continuing series of authoritative reviews on topics of central importance to the field of learning disabilities. While some reviews may focus on basic research on the physiological, cognitive, or social characteristics of learning disabled children, others will examine evidence for the efficacy of various remedial techniques. The present article is a continuation of last month's discussion of individual differences in cognitive processes related to reading. The article contains an excellent presentation of recent research that demonstrates several different ways the ability to use context can influence reading performance.---J.K.T. The literature on individual differences in cognitive processes that operate at the text level is reviewed. Less-skilled readers display performance deficits on a wide variety of short-term memory tasks, probably due to an inability to efficiently employ various memory strategies, and most certainly due to inadequate phonological coding. Poor readers are not characterized by a general ability to use contextual information to facilitate word recognition. However, situations where such readers fail to utilize context to facilitate ongoing word recognition will arise when their slow and inaccurate decoding of words renders the context useless. Poor readers do display comprehension deficits that are independent of word-decoding skill, due to deficient syntactic abilities and to more general metacognitive strategies. The general conclusions from this review and from Part I are discussed.