ABSTRACT
What is a chapter on psycholinguistics doing in a book on reading? And why, if at all, does it deserve to be placed ahead of the remaining chapters? Psycholinguistics as an interdisciplinary science is only about a quarter of a century old. Up to the present time, probably very few children, and even fewer adults, have learned to read by virtue of any specific benefits or insights that psycholinguistics might have yielded. In fact, for the last several thousand years people have been learning to read without the help of psycholinguistics.
