ABSTRACT
The recent surge of interest in reading on the part of experimental psychologists doubtless has at least two sources of motivation. One of these has to do with the urgent social problems of dealing with literacy and reading disabilities, the other with the fact that reading embodies a number of aspects of perception and memory that are of much current interest in their own right. The psychology of reading had a flying start during the first few years of this century with the pioneering work of Cattell (1886) and Huey (1908), using ingenious experimental techniques and instrumentation for the measurement of eye movements in reading and the analysis of perception during single fixations — work that has been improved upon but little down to the present. The slow development of the psychology of reading as a specialty within cognitive psychology, following that auspicious beginning, must be attributed, I think, to the fact that for many decades the state of theory lagged behind the advance of experimental methodology, and as a consequence concepts and models were not available to interpret the findings that laboratory techniques were capable of delivering.
