In the Author Recognition Test (ART) participants are presented with a series of names and foils and are asked to indicate which ones they recognize as authors. The test is a strong predictor of reading skill, with this predictive ability generally explained as occurring because author knowledge is likely acquired through reading or other forms of print exposure. This large-scale study (1012 college student participants) used Item Response Theory (IRT) to analyze item (author) characteristics to facilitate identification of the determinants of item difficulty, provide a basis for further test development, and to optimize scoring of the ART. Factor analysis suggests a potential two factor structure of the ART differentiating between literary vs. popular authors. Effective and ineffective author names were identified so as to facilitate future revisions of the ART. Analyses showed that the ART is a highly significant predictor of time spent encoding words as measured using eye-tracking during reading. The relationship between the ART and time spent reading provided a basis for implementing a higher penalty for selecting foils, rather than the standard method of ART scoring (names selected minus foils selected). The findings provide novel support for the view that the ART is a valid indicator of reading volume. Further, they show that frequency data can be used to select items of appropriate difficulty and that frequency data from corpora based on particular time periods and types of text may allow test adaptation for different populations.

A large-scale eye-tracking study examined individual variability in measures of word recognition during reading among 546 college students, focusing on two established individual-differences measures: the Author Recognition Test (ART) and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN). ART and RAN were only slightly correlated, suggesting that the two tasks reflect independent cognitive abilities in this large sample of participants. Further, individual variability in ART and RAN scores were related to distinct facets of word-recognition processes. Higher ART scores were associated with increased skipping rates, shorter gaze duration, and reduced effects of word frequency on gaze duration, suggesting that this measure reflects efficiency of basic processes of word recognition during reading. In contrast, faster times on RAN were associated with enhanced foveal-onparafoveal effects, fewer first-pass regressions, and shorter second-pass reading times, suggesting that this measure reflects efficient coordination of perceptual-motor and attentional processing during reading. These results demonstrate that ART and RAN tasks make independent contributions to predicting variability in word-recognition processes during reading.

No abstract