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Most definitions of dyslexia involve the assessment of a discrepancy between reading ability and measured intelligence. These discrepancy definitions carry the implicit assumption that the reading difficulties of the dyslexic stem from problems different from those characterizing the poor reader without IQ discrepancy. An accumulating body of empirical evidence appears to contradict this assumption. The phenotypic performance profile that defines reading disability does not seem to differ for reading-disabled children with or without aptitude/achievement discrepancies. Degree of aptitude/achievement discrepancy is unrelated to the unique cognitive tradeoffs that are characteristic of the word identification performance of reading-disabled children. Genetic studies have indicated that IQ-discrepancy measurement does not identify a group of children with significantly different heritability values for core information processing deficits. Finally, there are as yet no indications that the neuroanatomical anomalies that are associated with reading disability are more characteristic of high-IQ than of low-IQ poor readers. These findings are extremely problematic for traditional conceptions of reading disability that rely on aptitude/achievement discrepancy to define a group of children whose reading problems are cognitively, physiologically, and etiologically distinctive.

This article features an interdisciplinary debate and dialogue about the nature of mind, perception, and rationality. Scholars from a range of disciplines—cognitive science, applied and experimental psychology, behavioral economics, and biology—offer critiques and commentaries of a target article by Felin, Koenderink, and Krueger (2017): “Rationality, Perception, and the All-Seeing Eye,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. The commentaries raise a number of criticisms and issues concerning rationality and the all-seeing-eye argument, including the nature of judgment and reasoning, biases versus heuristics, organism–environment relations, perception and situational construal, equilibrium analysis in economics, efficient markets, and the nature of empirical observation and the scientific method. The debated topics have far-reaching consequences for the rationality literature specifically, as well as for the cognitive, psychological, and economic sciences more broadly. The commentaries are followed by a response from the authors of the target article. Their response is organized around three central issues: (1) the problem of cues; (2) what is the question?; and (3) equilibria, $500 bills, and the axioms of rationality.

Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is measured by questionnaire items that tap the willingness to consider alternative opinions, the sensitivity to evidence contradictory to current beliefs, the willingness to postpone closure, and reflective thought. AOT has been found to be a strong predictor of performance on heuristics and biases tasks and of the avoidance of reasoning traps such as superstitious thinking and belief in conspiracy theories. Recently, several studies that have employed short forms of the AOT scale have shown startlingly high negative correlations with religiosity (in the range of −0.50 to −0.70). In a re-analysis of a large dataset, we demonstrate that it was a particular type of AOT item (termed a belief revision item, BR) that accounts for these large correlations. To our consternation, we realized that it was our research team that had introduced these items into the literature two decades ago, but we had heretofore never realized the potential for these items to skew correlations. In a new experiment, we demonstrate how BR items of this type disadvantage religious-minded subjects, and we show that it is possible to construct BR items with parallel content that are not so demographically biased. We also show that unbiased BR items do not sacrifice the predictive power that has previously been shown by AOT scales. We believe this lesson in item construction resulted from the lack of intellectual diversity in our own laboratory (specifically, the overwhelmingly secular composition of our lab personnel). We believe this case study shows the importance of intellectual diversity in psychology, especially when studying such topics as religiosity and political attitudes.

I agree with the target essay that psychology has something to offer in helping to address societal problems. Intelligence has helped meliorate some social problems throughout history, including the period of time that is covered by the Flynn effect, but I agree with Sternberg that other psychological characteristics may be contributing as well, particularly increases in rationality. I also believe that increasing human rationality could have a variety of positive societal affects at levels somewhat smaller in grain size than the societal problems that Sternberg focuses on. Some of the societal problems that Sternberg lists, however, I do not think would be remedied by increases in rationality, intelligence, or wisdom, because remedy might be the wrong word in the context of these issues. Issues such as how much inequality of income to tolerate, how much pollution to tolerate, and how much we should sacrifice economic growth for potential future changes in global temperature represent issues of clashing values, not the inability to process information, nor the lack of information, nor the failure to show wisdom.

This chapter presents some conclusions and speculations about the cognitive mechanisms that underlie individual differences in reading acquisition. It then considers some of the processes and skills that have been widely discussed in the past decade in the literature on individual differences in reading. The chapter provides equal attention to some of the implications that failing at early reading acquisition, and failing for particular reasons, has for later academic achievement and for cognitive development in general. Research has demonstrated that difficulty at using context to facilitate the recognition of words is not a major cause of reading failure or a major determinant of variability in reading achievement. Studies of early reading converge with the research with older children and adults in indicating that reading acquisition in less-skilled children seems not to be impeded by an inability to use context to facilitate word recognition.

Myside bias occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior opinions and attitudes. Research across a wide variety of myside bias paradigms has revealed a somewhat surprising finding regarding individual differences. The magnitude of the myside bias shows very little relation to intelligence. Avoiding myside bias is thus one rational thinking skill that is not assessed by intelligence tests or even indirectly indexed through its correlation with cognitive ability measures.

Many critics of dual-process models have mistaken long lists of descriptive terms in the literature for a full-blown theory of necessarily co-occurring properties. These critiques have distracted attention from the cumulative progress being made in identifying the much smaller set of properties that truly do define Type 1 and Type 2 processing. Our view of the literature is that autonomous processing is the defining feature of Type 1 processing. Even more convincing is the converging evidence that the key feature of Type 2 processing is the ability to sustain the decoupling of secondary representations. The latter is a foundational cognitive requirement for hypothetical thinking.

As teacher quality becomes a central issue in discussions of children’s literacy, both researchers and policy makers alike express increasing concern with how teachers structure and allocate their lesson time for literacy-related activities as well as with what they know about reading development, processes, and pedagogy. The authors examined the beliefs, literacy knowledge, and proposed instructional practices of 121 first-grade teachers. Through teacher self-reports concerning the amount of instructional time they would prefer to devote to a variety of language arts activities, the authors investigated the structure of teachers’ implicit beliefs about reading instruction and explored relationships between those beliefs, expertise with general or special education students, years of experience, disciplinary knowledge, and self-reported distribution of an array of instructional practices. They found that teachers’ implicit beliefs were not significantly associated with their status as a regular or special education teacher, the number of years they had been teaching, or their disciplinary knowledge. However, it was observed that subgroups of teachers who highly valued particular approaches to reading instruction allocated their time to instructional activities associated with other approaches in vastly different ways. It is notable that the practices of teachers who privileged reading literature over other activities were not in keeping with current research and policy recommendations. Implications and considerations for further research are discussed.

A framework for conceptualizing the development of individual differences in reading ability is presented that synthesizes a great deal of the research literature. The framework places special emphasis on the effects of reading on cognitive development and on “bootstrapping” relationships involving reading. Of key importance are the concepts of reciprocal relationships—situations where the causal connection between reading ability and the efficiency of a cognitive process is bidirectional-and organism-environment correlation—the fact that differentially advantaged organisms are exposed to nonrandom distributions of environmental quality. Hypotheses are advanced to explain how these mechanisms operate to create rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer patterns of reading achievement. The framework is used to explicate some persisting problems in the literature on reading disability and to conceptualize remediation efforts in reading.

Two critical thinking skills—the tendency to avoid myside bias and to avoid one-sided thinking—were examined in three different experiments involving over 1200 participants and across two different paradigms. Robust indications of myside bias were observed in all three experiments. Participants gave higher evaluations to arguments that supported their opinions than those that refuted their prior positions. Likewise, substantial one-side bias was observed—participants were more likely to prefer a one-sided to a balanced argument. There was substantial variation in both types of bias, but we failed to find that participants of higher cognitive ability displayed less myside bias or less one-side bias. Although cognitive ability failed to associate with the magnitude of the myside bias, the strength and content of the prior opinion did predict the degree of myside bias shown. Our results indicate that cognitive ability—as defined by traditional psychometric indicators—turns out to be surprisingly independent ...

Natural myside bias is the tendency to evaluate propositions from within one's own perspective when given no instructions or cues (such as within-participants conditions) to avoid doing so. We defined the participant's perspective as their previously existing status on four variables: their sex, whether they smoked, their alcohol consumption, and the strength of their religious beliefs. Participants then evaluated a contentious but ultimately factual proposition relevant to each of these demographic factors. Myside bias is defined between-participants as the mean difference in the evaluation of the proposition between groups with differing prior status on the variable. Whether an individual difference variable (such as cognitive ability) is related to the magnitude of the myside bias is indicated by whether the individual difference variable interacts with the between-participants status variable. In two experiments involving a total of over 1400 university students (n = 1484) and eight different comparis...

This study examined the predictors of belief bias in a formal reasoning paradigm (a syllogistic reasoning task) and myside bias in two informal reasoning paradigms (an argument generation task and an experiment evaluation task). Neither cognitive ability nor thinking dispositions predicted myside bias, but both cognitive ability and thinking dispositions were significant predictors of the ability to overcome belief bias in the syllogistic reasoning task. However, instructional set (either decontextualizing or non-directive instructions) had a significant effect on myside bias in the argument generation task, as well as a marginal effect on the syllogistic reasoning task. On the latter, and to some extent on the former task, instructional set interacted with cognitive ability. The debiasing effect of decontextualizing instructions was particularly large for those participants in the lowest quartile of cognitive ability.

Over the past two decades I have written several articles about assessment procedures in the field of learning disabilities (LD) (Stanovich, 1986, 1988, 1991, 1993, 1996, 1999a, 2000). Many of those articles were centered around the issue of aptitude-achievement discrepancy as a defining feature of a learning disability. In dealing with this issue again here and talking about its future, I was drawn to the title of this essay. The title advertises my frustration with the field on this issue. The persistence of the discrepancy concept in LD signals that the field is not ready to put itself on a scientific footing and that it will continue to operate on the borders of pseudoscience. It is ironic that my other research area is critical thinking, particularly the cognitive processes that lead to pseudoscientific thinking (Stanovich, 1999b, 2002, 2004). The fixation on discrepancy measurement provides a test case of things that I study in that area: confirmation bias (e.g., Nickerson, 1998) and failure to consider alternative theories (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 1999; Stanovich, 1999b, 2004). Imagine that your current HMO covered only the procedures and diseases recognized by the medical profession in 1950. The thought is ridiculous because in such a rapidly developing field as medicine, no one would expect practice to be frozen at the level of scientific knowledge attained 50 years ago. In a less extreme fashion, though, this is what has happened in LD. The field suffers greatly from its tendency to base practice on concepts and psychometric technologies that have been superseded by subsequent scientific advance. I am referring here to the field's persistence in linking the definition of learning disability to the concept of aptitude-achievement discrepancy and identifying aptitude with intelligence test performance. In the following, I confine my comments to reading disability, the most common type of learning disability, and the one where my expertise is concentrated. In the October 2004 issue of the APA Monitor, a leading figure in LD diagnosis is quoted as saying that "the intelligence test is our stethoscope, like it or not" (Kersting, 2004, p. 54), even though there is no research consensus that LD diagnosis using intelligence as a proxy for aptitude is useful or conceptually justified (Siegel, 1989, 1992). Where would one find support for treating the concept of aptitude-achievement discrepancy as foundational--as it has been in practice in the LD field? One would look for evidence supporting four different propositions: (1) that the pattern of information-processing skills that underlie the reading deficits of low-IQ poor readers is different from the information-processing skills that underlie the reading deficits of high-IQ poor readers; (2) that the neuroanatomical differences that underlie the cognitive deficits of these two groups are different; (3) that low- and high-IQ poor readers require different treatments to remediate their reading problems; and (4) that there is differential etiology in the two groups based on different heritability of the component deficits. Why do I call reliance on discrepancy definitions in the LD field an example of pseudoscientific practice? Because there is no strong research consensus supporting any of these four propositions. THE MISSING EVIDENCE Regarding point #1, the preponderance of evidence indicates that the primary indicators of reading difficulty at the word-recognition level do not differentiate poor readers with discrepancy from readers without. For example, several studies have compared the performance of poor readers with high and low IQs and have found that they display equivalent pseudoword reading deficits. Similarly, the two groups display roughly equal deficits in phonological segmentation skills. On measures of orthographic processing, where reading disabled children are generally less impaired, the groups again display no differences. …

Remarkable progress has been made in the last 30 years toward understanding the basic psychological processes that underlie the act of reading. Dissemination of these results has sometimes been hampered because they are associated with strong stances on 5 different dimensions that represent styles of doing science. Research into the psychology of reading has been characterized by an emphasis on correspondence theories of truth rather than coherence, an emphasis on analytic reductionism rather than holism, an emphasis on probabilistic prediction (as opposed to a case-based approach), the search for robust-process explanations (rather than actual-sequence explanations), and a concern for consilience. These scientific styles have served the field well to this point, but that does not mean that we have calibrated their use in the optimal manner. Critiques by those with differing scientific styles may help the field to adjust its stance on these style dimensions in ways that foster scientific progress. This ar...

SUMMARY One hundred and twelve undergraduate university students completed an informal reasoning task in which they were asked to generate arguments both for and against the position they endorsed on three separate issues. Performance on this task was evaluated by comparing the number of arguments they generated which endorsed (myside arguments) and which refuted (otherside arguments) their own position on that issue. Participants generated more myside arguments than otherside arguments on all three issues, thus consistently showing a myside bias effect on each issue. Differences in cognitive ability were not associated with individual differences in myside bias. However, year in university was a significant predictor of myside bias. The degree of myside bias decreased systematically with year in university. Year in university remained a significant predictor of myside bias even when both cognitive ability and age were statistically partialled out. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It has been proposed that the phonological coredeficit that is linked to reading failure hasas its underlying cause a deficit in temporalprocessing. In a multivariate investigationdesigned to examine the temporal processingdeficit hypothesis, thirty reading-disabled(RD) adults, thirty-two normally achievingadults and thirty-one normally achievingchildren (reading-level controls) wereadministered a comprehensive battery thatincluded a wide range of timing tasks, inaddition to reading and phonological measures. Although adults with RD displayed overallperformance that was below that of normallyachieving adults on most of the timing tasks,their performance was not differentiallyinfluenced by rate of stimulus presentation. Although the RD adults displayed the typicalpattern of impaired phonological awareness andpseudoword reading relative to reading-levelmatched children, the reading-disabled adultsoutperformed the children on the timing tasks. Finally, with the exception of continuousnaming, the timing tasks shared little variancewith phonological sensitivity and contributedlittle unique variance to word reading. Although these findings undermine the timingdeficit hypothesis, they do provide evidencefor the involvement of naming deficits inreading disability.

Sternberg's call for an educational focus on teaching wisdom can be viewed as part of a nascent trend to reorient educational psychology away from exclusive focus on the so-called algorithmic level of analysis. The thrust of his research program on wisdom, like those emphasizing rationality as a critical construct in educational psychology, is on aspects of cognition heretofore backgrounded: the goals and beliefs of the learner, thinking dispositions, values, morality, cognitive styles, and the evaluation of cognition in terms of normative criteria.

After years of confusion, the literature on individual differences in reading ability is finally beginning to coalesce around a small set of general conclusions that are endorsed by the vast majority of researchers. The most fundamental is that word decoding ability accounts for a very large proportion of the variance in reading ability at all levels. Variation in word decoding skill is primarily the result of differences in phonological abilities, rather than visual processes. Less-skilled readers are not characterized by a general inability to use context to facilitate word recognition. However, situations where such readers fail to utilize context to facilitate word recognition will arise when their slow and inaccurate decoding of words renders the context useless. Less-skilled readers display performance deficits on a wide variety of short-term memory tasks, probably due to an inability to efficiently employ various memory strategies, and most certainly due to inadequate phonological coding. Less-skilled readers may have comprehension deficits that are partially independent of word decoding skill. These problems probably arise because syntactic abilities and metacognitive strategies are inadequately developed.

A coherent conception of dyslexia has been difficult to arrive at because research findings have continually created logical paradoxes for the psychometric definition of reading disability. One such paradox is that cognitive research has undermined the assumption of specificity in the definition of dyslexia. The assumption of specificity is the underlying premise that the cognitive problems characteristic of the dyslexic child are reasonably specific to the reading task and do not implicate broader domains of cognitive functioning. This paper demonstrates how to develop hypotheses about the cognitive deficits of dyslexic children that do not undermine the assumption of specificity. Phonological awareness is explored as one candidate process. It is argued that in order to avoid the pitfalls surrounding the assumption of specificity three things are important: 1) We must understand the operation of Matthew effects in education (rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer effects); 2) Strict psychometric criteria must be used to define dyslexia; 3) We must continually be aware that dyslexia does not demarcate a discrete category, separate from other groups of poor readers, but represents the outcome of the application of an arbitrary criterion in a continuous distribution.

We studied developmental trends in 5 important reasoning tasks that are critical components of the operational definition of rational thinking. The tasks measured denominator neglect, belief bias, base rate sensitivity, resistance to framing, and the tendency toward otherside thinking. In addition to age, we examined 2 other individual difference domains that index cognitive sophistication: cognitive ability (intelligence and executive functioning) and thinking dispositions (actively open-minded thinking, superstitious thinking, and need for cognition). All 5 reasoning domains were consistently related to cognitive sophistication regardless of how it was indexed (age, cognitive ability, thinking dispositions). The implications of these findings for taxonomies of developmental trends in rational thinking tasks are discussed.

The Boston University (BU) case illustrates how the psychometrics of ability differences interact with the concept of learning disability and with the sodopolitics of schooling and society. It also illustrates that learning disabilities advocacy will not be on a sound footing as long as the field refuses to rid itself of its IQ fetishism, refuses to jettison its fixation on aptitude-achievement discrepancy, and fails to free clinical practice from the pseudoscientific neurology that plagued the field in the 1970s. A more inclusive definition of learning disability—one that abandons discrepancy notions-and a more self-critical attitude toward its own claims would advance the field of learning disabilities and help to rid it of distractions such as the BU case.

Sixty-eight third graders who were less-skilled readers performed more poorly than younger reading-level control children on tests of pseudoword reading and phonological sensitivity. These findings add to the growing consensus that the proximal cause of reading difficulties are spelling-sound coding problems that result from deficient underlying phonological processes and structures. Analyses of their word and pseudoword reading performance provided some suggestive evidence that less-skilled readers are less sensitive than their younger reading-level matched counterparts to all subword-size orthographic units, perhaps especially to grapheme-sized units.

This article presents a meta-analysis of spelling-to-sound regularity effects in individuals with reading disabilities and reading-level comparison groups. The phonological-deficit model of reading disabilities, coupled with the classic dual-route model of word recognition, has led to two predictions: (a) a specific deficit in the pseudoword reading of those with reading disabilities and (b) an absent or reduced regularity effect for those with reading disabilities relative to reading-level controls. Previous reviews confirm the first prediction. The present meta-analysis tested the second prediction. There was a clear effect of word regularity for individuals with reading disabilities, the magnitude of which did not differ from the word regularity effect for reading-level controls. The authors explore how the contradictory support for these 2 predictions is inconsistent with classic dual-route models of word reading and how connectionist models are consistent with the empirical findings on reading disability.

This study examined the influence of print exposure on syllogistic reasoning and knowledge of mental-state verbs. One hundred thirty-three college students completed measures of reading comprehension, knowledge of mental-state verbs, syllogistic reasoning, and print exposure. A series of hierarchical regression analyses indicated that the print-exposure measure accounted for significant unique variance in performance on a measure of knowledge or- mental-state verbs, even after years of college completed, grade point average, and reading comprehension were statistically controlled. Print exposure proved to be a less robust predictor of performance on a syllogistic reasoning task when examined with a parallel series of analyses. These findings suggest that even the variation in literacy activity found among college students is associated with the ability to interpret texts by enhancing the ability to deal with subtle distinctions among mental-state terms. However, the view that print exposure fosters decont...

Byrnes and Fox get much right in their review of the relevance of cognitive neuroscience for educational psychology. They are correct that theoretical reduction is to be welcomed. They are also right that neurophysiological findings can constrain psychological theory and that this too is to be welcomed. Their review is on the mark in recommending that educational psychologists must become “bilingual” in their understanding of neurological terms and their analogous psychological constructs. The one difference in our positions that I do highlight is one of calibration rather than strong disagreement—my level of enthusiasm for scientific reduction in domains related to education is somewhat more muted than that of Byrnes and Fox because of wariness bom of the premature reductive attempts that litter our field.

By middle childhood most students understand the concept of evidence, but do not use it when reading or writing arguments. It was hypothesized that teaching concepts about argument components, and tenching a strategy to organize the application of these concepts, would improve students' evaluations of written arguments. In a two-by-two factorial design, 55 grade 5 students read, wrote, and discussed arguments in instructional groups that emphasized: argument concepts; an organizational strategy; both concepts and strategy; or neither concepts nor strategy. Students in all treatment groups improved relative to the control group in evaluating arguments, and transferred gains from social to science items. Concept instruction significantly improved students' evaluations of invalid arguments with plausible claims. Strategy instruction significantly improved their argument writing.

In this article the authors outline a number of disparate reactions to the Gersten et al. (this issue) piece. Gersten et al. rightly point out that researchers' reluctance to draw conclusions from ambiguous data is at odds with educators' daily demands and serves to reduce the impact of research. In contrast, the authors argue that on those occasions when educators have confronted the application of undocumented practices, they have done society a great service. The lack of middle-level scientist/practitioners in the education field is discussed. This situation puts much more of a burden on educational practitioners and researchers to stretch themselves to communicate with each other. Issues of source credibility become paramount, and widespread dissemination of scientific criteria for evaluating claims is critical. Finally, it is argued that researchers and educators are kindred spirits at the epistemological level, because both are grounded in a “what works” epistemology.

Summary We react to the recent commentaries on discrepancy definitions of reading disability by Frederickson and Reason (1995), Ashton (1996), and Solity (1996). We clarify many of the arguments in our earlier writings on the subject (Stanovich, 1991; 1994; Stanovich and Stanovich, 1996). Over a decade ago, when we started writing on this issue, there was little evidence indicating that poor readers of high and low IQ differed importantly in the primary processing mechanisms that were the cause of their reading failure. A further decade's worth of empirical work on this issue has still failed to produce such evidence. In the research community, the idea that aptitude/ achievement discrepancy tells us anything important about the processing mechanisms underlying reading difficulties is becoming untenable. The progress in understanding reading and reading failure that has been made is virtually orthogonal to the issue of reading/IQ discrepancy (see Shaywitz, 1996).

The factorial structure underlying different types of tasks within the domain of phonological awareness was examined in two studies. Large sample sizes allowed for sensitive differentiation of constructs. In the first study, 128 preschool children without any experience of formal reading instruction were tested with a battery of tasks intended to tap various aspects of phonological awareness: rhyme recognition, syllable counting, initial-phoneme matching, initial-phoneme deletion, phoneme blending, and phoneme counting. Three basic components were extracted in a principal component analysis: a phoneme factor, a syllable factor and a rhyme factor. Cross-tabulations indicated considerable dissociation between performance on phoneme, syllable, and rhyme tasks. The structural relationships were replicated on a much larger sample (n=1509) in the second study. Subjects in this study were one year older and were attending grade 1 thus providing an opportunity to test their reading achievement. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the phonemic factor was by far the most potent predictor. However, the rhyming factor made an independent (although small) contribution to explaining the reading variance. Among the phonemic tasks, phoneme identification proved to be the most powerful predictor.

Obviously, in order to answer the question posed in the title, we must specifywhat we mean by the term dyslexia. And, in doing so, we immediately encounterthe crux of the problem. This problem is a recurring one in the field ofdevelopmental disabilities, and it arises because the field has repeatedlydisplayed a preference for terminology that connotes unverified theories aboutcausation. For example, in this journal Bishop (1992) has recendy noted how theterms developmental dysphasia and developmental aphasia have "fallen intodisfavour in the U.K. and tj.S.A,, largely because they misleadingly imply that weare dealing with a single condition with a known neurological basis" (p. 3).Likewise, the term dyslexia is out of favor in many educational and researchcommunities within North America—and for similar reasons. As we shall see,"dyslexia" carries with it so many empirically unverified connotations andassumptions that many researchers and practitioners prefer to avoid the term.Indeed, it does seem that reading research could benefit from adopting moreneutral terms for the phenomena that it studies. Terminology that is less likely tocarry with it a speculative theory is to be preferred in the early stages of scientificinvestigation. The reading field seems unnaturally prone to popularizingterminology that carries with it unproven theory. For example, publications inearly literacy research in North America are currently littered with the terms"emergent literacy" and "invented spelling". But, just as with "dyslexia", these arenot neutral terms. They are not descriptions of certain operationally-definedperformance patterns in early literacy. These terms convey a theory of earlyliteracy acquisition (e.g. that it is natural and will normally progress withoutmuch formal tuition) that is without empirical support (Adams, 1990; Liberman

In this study, we introduce a new analytic strategy for comparing the cognitive profiles of children developing reading skills at different rates: a regression-based logic that is analogous to the reading-level match design, but one without some of the methodological problems of that design. It provides a unique method for examining whether the reading subskill profiles of poor readers with aptitude/achievement discrepancy differ from those without discrepancy. Children were compared on a varied set of phonological, orthographic, memory, and language processing tasks. The results indicated that cognitive differences between these 2 groups of poor readers all reside outside of the word recognition module

Current definitions of reading disability and/or dyslexia all involve the assessment of a discrepancy between reading ability and measured intelligence. These discrepancy definitions carry the implicit assumption that the reading difficulties of the dyslexic stem from problems different from those characterizing the poor reader without IQ discrepancy. The phonological-core variable-difference model is a framework for interpreting the evidence on the cognitive differentiability of poor readers of different types. The model and empirical data pertinent to it are discussed. Scientific and educational classification procedures that follow from the model are described. Problems with the use of intelligence test scores as aptitude benchmarks in the measurement of discrepancy are discussed. Finally, it is argued that procedures of discrepancy assessment, including those proposed here, are threatened by findings that the acquisition of literacy fosters the very cognitive skills assessed by aptitude measures.

First-grade children completed a battery of tasks that included standardized measures of word recognition and spelling, measures of phonological and orthographic processing skill, and a short indicator of exposure to print via home literacy experiences. Phonological and orthographic processing skill were separable components of variance in word recognition. Orthographic processing ability accounted for variance in word recognition ability even after the variance in three phonological processing measures had been partialed. Additionally, variance in orthographic processing ability not explained by phonological abilities was reliably linked to differences in print exposure. The print exposure measure was not, however, linked to the measures of phonological processing. This finding was unexpected but it is consistent with some previous research. The theoretical implications of this result are discussed.

In a study of 268 college students, measures of exposure to print predicted individual differences in knowledge in a variety of domains even after individual differences on 4 indicators of general ability (high school grade point average, Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices, Nelson-Denny Reading Test-Comprehension subtest, and a mathematics ability test) had been statistically controlled. Although correlational, our results suggest that print exposure is an independent contributor to the acquisition of content knowledge. The data challenge the view that knowledge acquisition is determined only by the efficiency of cognitive components that encode and store information

Sixty-three 5th-grade children completed daily-activity diaries indicating how they spent their nonschool time for 15 days. From these diaries, estimates of the minutes per day that were spent in various activities were derived. The estimate of book-wading time from the activity diary correlated with new measures of individual differences in exposure to print that use a checklist-with-foils logic and that have very brief administration times. Both diary-estimated and checklist-estimated book reading predicted a variety of verbal outcome measures, but estimates of television watching did not

Previous research on whether exposure to print could account for individual differences in growth in children's reading comprehension has produced conflicting results ( Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988 ; Taylor, Frye, & Maruyama, 1990 ). We conducted a longitudinal study of growth in reading ability employing two new indicators of print exposure that use a checklist-with-foils logic and that have very brief administration times. We found that individual differences in third- to fifth-grade growth in reading were significantly related to these indicators of print exposure. It appears that the extent to which individuals engage in literacy activities is a significant contributor to developed reading ability. Further studies of the cognitive consequences of literacy could be facilitated by the use of the easily administered indicators of print exposure that we examined in this study.

Building upon work which considers the implications dual-process theory for the great rationality debate in cognitive science, this chapter advances that discussion, first by discussing additions and complications to dual-process theory and then by working through the implications of these ideas for our view of human rationality. It argues that System 2 needs to be understood in terms of two levels of processing: the algorithmic and the reflective.

Most definitions of reading disability and/or dyslexia involve assessment of a discrepancy between reading ability and measured intelligence. In this article, it is argued that the use of intelligence as an aptitude benchmark in defining dyslexia conceals unsupported assumptions about educational potential and makes it difficult to differentiate the cognitive characteristics of dyslexic children from those of other poor readers. The use of a more educationally relevant aptitude measure such as listening comprehension is suggested. However, it is argued that all discrepancy definitions predicated on mismatches between aptitude and achievement are threatened by findings that acquisition of literacy fosters the cognitive skills assessed on aptitude measures. These findings undermine the logic of discrepancy measurement by weakening the distinction between aptitude and achievement.

In a study of ninety college seniors, measures of exposure to print predicted individual differences in vocabulary and cultural literacy after differences in general ability (SAT scores) had been statistically controlled, but did not predict differences in grade point average or knowledge of the field of major (psychology). Measures of exposure to nonprint media (television and films) predicted variance in cultural literacy, but not in vocabulary, after cognitive ability had been controlled. The data challenge the view that knowledge acquisition is determined only by the efficiency of cognitive components that encode and store information. Instead, the results indicate that differences in exposure to information are a significant independent contributor to differences in knowledge across individuals. The investigation further demonstrated the convergent validity of two briefly administered indicators of individual differences in exposure to print.

This study assessed the construct validity of a recently introduced measure of children's exposure to print, the Title Recognition Test (TRT)

(1991). The causes and consequences of differences in reading fluency. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 30, Fluency in Oral Reading, pp. 176-184.

The scope of this review must be restricted in several ways. First the focus is on reading specifically. Although reading is but a component of the language activities called literacy, it must certainly be at the heart of whatever concept of literacy is adopted (Venezky, Wagner and Ciliberti 1990).

In a study of third- and fourth-grade children it was established that orthographic processing ability can account for variance in word recognition skill after the variance due to phonological processing has been partialed out. This independent orthographic variances was related to performance on a new measure of individual differences in exposure to print, the Title Recognition Test (TRT), that has a very brief administration time. Additionally, some of the orthographic processing variance linked to word recognition ability was not shared with either phonological processing measures or with print exposure

Research on the reading process has been undertaken from a variety of perspectives. Too often progress in understanding reading is impeded when researchers working from different perspectives adopt a strong assumption of paradigm incompatibility: that a gain for one perspective is a loss for another. These paradigm wars in reading research mirror those that have taken place within the general educational research community during the last decade. It is argued that this assumption of paradigm incompatibility is false, and that progress toward a comprehensive understanding of the reading process would be hastened if we declared an end to the paradigm wars in the reading field and if investigators from all perspectives agreed to peaceful co-existence. The understanding of reading and of individual differences in reading ability can be approached from a variety of perspectives (Lipson & Wixson, 1986). For example, reading may be approached from the perspective of the neurophysiologist interested in brain processes underlying differences in reading behavior; from the perspective of the cognitive psychologist interested in isolating information processing functions that explain reading ability; and from the perspective of the social constructivist theorist interested in how social structures define, support, and suppress certain literacy acts, based on the social value assigned to various activities. The variety of existing frameworks for understanding reading might be viewed as a reflection of the complexity of the reading process. The differing perspectives might have been interpreted as indicating the necessity of multiple levels of analysis in this complex domain. Unfortunately, anyone familiar with reading research knows that this is not the history of our field. As with so many issues in reading, we

The concept of limited cognitive resources loomed large in reading theory for a considerable period, largely due to the impact of LaBerge and Samuels' influential automaticity theory. However, experiments that attempted to trace the development of automatic word recognition processes generated empirical paradoxes because the different criteria employed to operationalize the automaticity concept did not display convergent validity. For example, the development of obligatory processing did not completely coincide with the development of capacity-free processing. Recently, developmental reading theories have deemphasized the capacity component of the automaticity concept and have focused on another property: information encapsulation. The latter property is the centerpiece of the concept of modularity in cognitive science, a theoretical notion only partially overlapping with automaticity. Most current conceptions of the development of reading skill emphasize issues of the quality of lexical representations and information encapsulation—conceptions thought to be more empirically tractable than resource notions, given the history of methodological and theoretical complications involving the latter.