On the relations between letter, word, and sentence-level processing during reading

Abstract

Much prior research on reading has focused on a specific level of processing, with this often being letters, words, or sentences. Here, for the first time in adult readers, we provide a combined investigation of these three key component processes of reading comprehension. We did so by testing the same group of participants in three tasks thought to reflect processing at each of these levels: alphabetic decision, lexical decision, and grammatical decision. Participants also performed a non-reading classification task, with an aim to partial-out common binary decision processes from the correlations across the three main tasks. We examined the pairwise partial correlations for response times (RTs) in the three reading tasks. The results revealed strong significant correlations across adjacent levels of processing (i.e., letter-word; word-sentence) and a non-significant correlation between non-adjacent levels (letter-sentence). The results provide an important new benchmark for evaluating computational models that describe how letters, words, and sentences contribute to reading comprehension.

Transposed-word effects in speeded grammatical decisions to sequences of spoken words

“…Crucially, theoretical psychologists have gone to great extents to develop mathematical models of speeded decision making (e.g., 18 ). Research using the lexical decision task has benefitted from such theoretical support (e.g., 19 ; 20 ), and we expect that the same will hold for research using the grammatical decision task (see 21 , for preliminary evidence).…”

The metrics of reading speed: understanding developmental dyslexia

“…Up to date, studies on reading and dyslexia focussed on letter/word level with little interest in integrating this information with the processing of multiple stimuli characteristic of standard reading as well as clinical reading testing. Very recently, work on the relationship between different levels of processing in reading is starting to come out 37 , 38 . In this vein, the present findings help shorten the gap between experimental measures of reading performance typically based on a reading single, isolated words, and standard, as well as clinical measures of reading, which require the processing of multiple stimuli.…”