ABSTRACT
How do skilled readers identify words? Research directed at answering this question has been carried out for nearly 100 years by investigators in both education and experimental psychology (Cattel, 1885; Huey, 1908). Although the process of recognizing a single word would seem to be relatively simple in comparison to the complex linguistic and memory processes necessary to comprehend written discourse, an understanding of how word recognition takes place has remained relatively elusive. One reason why it has been difficult to build appropriate models of word recognition is that the process combines the operation of some mechanisms usually designated as strictly perceptual with those generally considered to be linguistic.
