ABSTRACT
Investigations of reading acquisition by experimental psychologists are of two types. One is primarily correlational, and it seeks to characterize the children who find reading difficult. The second approach focuses on the learning task, usually on the successive stages through which the child goes on the way to reading mastery. Correlational studies compare groups of good readers and poor readers on some laboratory task or psychometric measure thought to be involved in the mastery of reading and in which some children may be considered to be deficient. It is possible that the explanatory power available could be constrained if it were required that each of the many hypothetical causes of reading problems fits a well-worked-out account of the acquisition procedure. The acquisition process has been thought of as a sequence of stages. If the hypothesized learning process disappears as soon as it is no longer possible to associate words with single orthographic components, it would lose most of its interest.
