The Representation Problem in Reading Acquisition

Abstract

In 1976 a series of three conferences on the &s;Theory and Practice of Early Reading&s; was held at the University of Pittsburgh&s;s Learning Research and Development Center. The conference focused on early reading rather than skilled reading because more was known about early reading. The appearance of holistic word perception goes back at least to Cattell&s;s (1886) studies of word perception and the word superiority effect. Advocates of meaning-emphasis instruction pointed to evidence that words are read as a whole and to Gestalt psychologists&s; demonstrations of holistic perceptual processes. There are both autonomous and interactive components in the identification of words. A restricted-interactive model incorporates the fully interactive connections among representations of words, letters, and phonemes. The characterization of an expert representation system is an important part of a theory of acquisition. In the case of reading acquisition, the critical representation system is a visually accessible lexicon.