Psychology of Reading

The roots of cognitive psychology, the branch of experimental psychology that studies how the mind works, can be traced to the establishment of Wundt's laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. Workers in Wundt's laboratory were keenly interested in questions related to memory and to language processing. Shortly thereafter, there was considerable interest in the process of reading which reached its apex with the publication of Huey ( 1908) The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. A perusal of the chapters in the first part of his book (that part dealing with the psychology of reading) will reveal that the chapters bear a remarkable similarity to the topics covered in the present volume and most other contemporary books dealing with the psychology of reading.

That there is a limit to how much print can be identified at any one time, varying according to the use a reader can make of redundancy, is not exactly a recent discovery. The illustration in this chapter of how much can be identified from a single glance at a row of random letters, random words, and meaningful sequences of words is derived directly from the researches of Cattell ( 1885, republished 1973) and of Erdmann and Dodge ( 1898). Descriptions of many similar experimental studies were included in a remarkably broad and insightful book by Huey which remains the only classic in the psychology of reading. A good deal of recent research on perception in reading is basically replication of early studies with more sophisticated equipment; nothing has been demonstrated to controvert them.

To assure the greatest possible number of successful readers, the teacher must know how to proceed toward his goal. He must become a student of methodology. No one method succeeds with all children. And no one teacher can employ all methods equally well. Thus, a psychology of reading must include an examination of the psychological principles underlying the various methods of teaching reading and offer some suggestions as to their strengths and weaknesses. The choice of methods must be made on the bases of the needs of the individual child. And the identification of these needs is a basic element in the psychology of reading.

The signals must be interpreted. In a psychology of reading we are concerned with the nature of the reading process and the nature of the reader. We are interested in the difficulties encountered in learning to read and in the differences In individual performance.

In the psychology of reading we also are interested in physiological factors. Factors such as visual and hearing defects, malnutrition, speech impairment, and handedness are intimately related to the psychology of reading. A child's psychology is not insulated from his physiology.

Evidently we cannot restrict our analysis to the findings of psychology. We are concerned with findings in the fields of biology, physiology, and neurology. We are also interested in the writings of professional educators who many times have clearer insight into the problems facing the teacher in the classroom than has the researcher.

The psychology of reading is a complex and vast field primarily because reading can be viewed from so many different vantage points. Each view and its array of problems has appealed to the curiosity of research workers. For example, we can focus upon the sensory bases of reading. Research on visual difficulties and on eye movements alone has been voluminous. Or we can focus our attention upon reading as a perceptual process. Here the psychological research and theory concerning all types of perception have a bearing on our understanding of reading. As a third facet of reading we see that it is a response and, as such, is influenced by motivation, physical well-being, fatigue, and habit.