ABSTRACT
This chapter considers several necessary constituents for a theory of the cognitive components of reading ability: a general account of the ability to be understood; and a description of the components of the general ability. M. D. Jackson and J. J. McClelland concluded that there are two primary ability factors, one a general language comprehension factor that is modality-free. The other is a name retrieval factor that operates when a symbol name is retrieved from memory in response to a visual input, regardless of whether the input is linguistic. The cognitive processes implicated are general language comprehension ability and simple symbol activation from visual input. Differences in reading ability among children can be understood in the same terms as the adult differences. The impression that words in a text are only sparsely sampled seems to have persisted for some time in the popular mind and even among reading educators and reading researchers.
