ABSTRACT
We organized this volume around the theme of reading and language processing, and accordingly, we invited contributors who were renowned for their work in these fields. We were fortunate not only to receive articles describing the state of the art in each group of researchers' own field, but also somewhat unintentionally, the articles now allow us to evaluate the conjoined phrase "reading and language processing" itself. For many researchers in cognitive psychology, the study of reading and the study of language processing are almost interchangeable. According to this view, it makes little difference whether linguistic materials are presented visually or auditorily; comprehension processes are generally agnostic about the mode in which linguistic information is presented. The contributions made to this volume indicate that this view is probably correct for just one specific area of research, namely text comprehension. Quite strikingly, a large number of papers in this volume indirectly make the point that the form in which linguistic information is presented is an important consideration in any study of language processing, and an important area of research in its own right. Auditory language processing may differ from reading on a variety of important dimensions-for example, in the temporal unfolding of information. Conversely, reading is not merely language comprehension made visual. Instead, the reading system to some extent operates according to its own mechanisms and principles (as the articles by Buchanan and Besner, by Daneman and Reingold, by Pollatsek, Raney, Lagasse, and Rayner, and by Henderson and Ferreira make clear), and in addition, the way in which linguistic information is visually laid out affects (at least to some extent) the way the information is processed.
