ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the mechanisms of visual word identification. The focus will be on reading difficulties experienced by developing readers. Their problems will be contrasted with normally reading peers and skilled performance observed in adults. It is impossible to present a complete overview of the research literature here. Rather, we shall focus on just one aspect in this chapter. Our purpose is to present a set of our own experiments comparing normal and poor readers in their use of word identification mechanisms. This comparison will be made at various processing levels involved in word identification. We do not deal with the development of word identification in early reading.
