ABSTRACT
The field of adult literacy suffers from a paucity of thorough and methodologically sound studies. Researchers have not investigated the learning processes of adults nearly as extensively as those of children and adolescents. As a result, very little is known about the word-reading processes of low-literate adults. Although the National Adult Literacy Survey (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993) identified adults who had difficulty performing everyday tasks, the survey focused on comprehension and functional literacy tasks and therefore may have overestimated the word-reading skills of low-literate adults (Perfetti & Marron, 1995). Additionally, the survey did not explore the underlying word-reading deficits that would help explain the nature of low-reading adults' weaknesses (Snow & Strucker, 2000).
