ABSTRACT
During the past decade experimental psychologists have shown a growing interest in the reading process. To a certain extent, this increased attention has occurred because investigators in both psycholinguistics and visual-information processing have found the reading task to be a natural laboratory for examining issues in cognitive processing. However, as with any phenomenon subjected to the scrutiny of the scientific community, the issue of reading has emerged as a multifaceted problem, with critical components of the task varying all the way from noncognitive aspects of preperceptual processing (e.g., Jackson & McClelland, 1975) to the operation of the complex cognitive mechanisms involved in the utilization of scripts (e.g., Bower, Black, & Turner, 1979) and the construction of inferences (Clark, 1977). In addition, given the large number of psychological phenomena that appear to be part of the overall task, it seems clear that if there is such a thing as a psychological moment of reading, it will surely reveal itself as being both temporally extended and entailing a constellation of subskills and phenomena.
