Letters, Words, Sentences, and Reading

In this personal, and therefore highly selective, review article I summarize work performed in collaboration with numerous colleagues on how skilled adult readers perform identification tasks and speeded binary decision tasks involving single letters and visually presented words and sentences. The overarching aim is to highlight similarities in the processing performed at three key levels involved in written language comprehension (in languages that use an alphabetic script): letters, words, and sentences. The comparisons are made using behavioral data obtained with: i) speeded (response-limited) binary decision tasks; and ii) the effects of simultaneous surrounding context on letter and word identification using both data-limited (non-speeded) and response-limited procedures. I then propose a general framework that combines the three levels of processing, and that connects core processes at each level with the processing involved in tasks designed to reflect those core processes, and I end by suggesting possible avenues for future research with an aim to extend this general framework.1