Contextual Information and the Reading Process

• In Event: Roundtable Session 52
  In Roundtable Session: Engagement and Literacy in Adult Learning

Abstract

This research investigates the ability of adult proficient readers to predict words that have been fully or partially deleted. Predictions were analyzed for accuracy, grammaticality, syntactic and semantic acceptability, and author’s meaning. Findings indicate that readers were more accurate in their predictions than commonly reported in the research and the significant saliency of beginning letter as advocated by some reading theorists. Various factors impacted the accuracy of readers’ predictions such as the grammatical nature of the word and its location in the sentence and the text. It may be the case that readers utilize whatever necessary information a text makes available and that the density or selectivity of the processing is very much text dependent.

Author

• Stephen B. Kucer, Washington State University - Vancouver