This article reports two studies that examined the relationship between word identification speed and story reading fluency, as indicated by speed and accuracy as well as comprehension. Poor readers in grade 4 were trained to read a set of single words and were then asked to repeatedly read stories that contained the trained words or stories with words not included in the training set. Benefits to text reading from single-word practice were observed, even for children who were particularly slow namers. The results are related to theoretical links between fluency and comprehension and to theories of developmental deficits.

The distinction between automatic and controlled attentional influences on priming effects was examined in a series of Stroop color-naming experiments. As expected, priming effects depended on the proportion of repeated trials-those in which a color word prime matched a following ink-color probe. However, responses were slower for repeated trials than for unrepeated trials when the proportion of repeated trials was no greater than chance (.25 with 4 colors). This effect was shown not to depend on slow-to-develop expectancies but did depend on the selective-attention requirements of the probe task. This dependence on probe task selection parallels an often reported result in the negative-priming literature (e.g., D. G. Lowe, 1979;S. P. Tipper & M. Cranston, 1985). Implications of these results for the distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval accounts of negative priming are discussed.

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