ABSTRACT
Reading is a skill, and a difficult one at that. An extended apprenticeship is required in order to master it fully. A great deal of psychological research has gone into identifying the factors that determine ease or difficulty of word recognition. The skilled reader causes the eyes to come to rest somewhere between the beginning and middle of a word. A clue as to why the "convenient viewing position" might be only two or three letters into a word comes from research investigating the area of uptake of visual information around the point of fixation. Letters and words to the left of fixation have already been identified and do not need to be processed further. It is more efficient to concentrate visual processing on those upcoming words that fall to the right of fixation. The psychological literature abounds with reports that high-frequency words are easier to recognise than low-frequency words. An early demonstration of this was given by Preston.
