The Myth of Normal Reading

Abstract

We argue that the educational and psychological sciences must embrace the diversity of reading rather than chase the phantom of normal reading behavior. We critically discuss the research practice of asking participants in experiments to read “normally.” We then draw attention to the large cross-cultural and linguistic diversity around the world and consider the enormous diversity of reading situations and goals. Finally, we observe that people bring a huge diversity of brains and experiences to the reading task. This leads to four implications: First, there are important lessons for how to conduct psycholinguistic experiments; second, we need to move beyond Anglocentric reading research and produce models of reading that reflect the large cross-cultural diversity of languages and types of writing systems; third, we must acknowledge that there are multiple ways of reading and reasons for reading, and none of them is normal or better or a “gold standard”; and fourth, we must stop stigmatizing individuals who read differently and for different reasons, and there should be increased focus on teaching the ability to extract information relevant to the person’s goals. What is important is not how well people decode written language and how fast people read but what people comprehend given their own stated goals.

Nuances of knowing: Brain potentials reveal implicit effects of domain knowledge on word processing in the absence of sentence‐level knowledge

“…In other words, domain knowledge can influence not only how readers access meaning but also how they use this meaning in the moment. These findings are in line with recent discussions of how variables like motivational states, goals, and task demands, among others, can shape different "modes" of language comprehension, including the extent to which individuals engage in relatively active compared to more passive comprehension (Christianson et al, 2022;Federmeier, 2021;Huettig & Ferreira, 2022).…”

Age-related differences in understanding pronominal reference in sentence comprehension: An electrophysiological investigation.

“…Interestingly, when high-span readers showed the Nref response to mismatched pronouns, they did not demonstrate a reliable P600 response to those feature-mismatched pronouns (Nieuwland, 2014, Experiment 1). Thus, in line with the view that there are multiple ways of reading (Huettig & Ferreira, 2023), these findings suggest that readers may adopt one of two alternative referential processing strategies when encountering feature-mismatched pronouns. In young adults, mismatched pronouns are generally treated as grammatical anomalies, but those with higher working memory capacities sometimes switch to an inferential process where they treat such pronouns as ambiguous when a straightforward coreference cannot be achieved.…”

A response to “The myth of normal reading” by Huettig and Ferreira, or: To the defence of reading research…

“…In a thought-provoking and provocative review article, Huettig and Ferreira (2022) argue that reading research is focussed predominantly on understanding and modelling a "normal reader". They discuss several implications of this premise: First, a normal reader is a mythical creature, and normal reading is a mythical process.…”