Psycholinguistic studies of literacy

Literacy can be defined as the sets of skills or abilities that operate in the service of comprehension for information we read or hear or see. This includes moment-by-moment understanding of that information, as well as the potential application of any knowledge acquired from that information in future settings. Studies of literacy have often focused on the types of activities that are necessary to ensure successful reading experiences. These have included case studies of classroom behavior, investigations of teacher practices, analyses of the processes that underlie visual encoding of letter stimuli, and interventions designed to remediate struggling readers' difficulties (to name a few areas of interest). In line with the simple view of reading, as offered by Gough and Tunmer (1986) and Hoover and Gough (1990), many of these projects have focused on two core sets of reading activities—basic-level processes that underlie the types of pattern recognition activities necessary to decode and identify words and sounds, and higher-order processes that are necessary to extract meaning from words and sentences. Additionally, these projects might be broadly categorized as investigating two aspects of reading experiences: (a) the study of the learning products that result from reading, as measured by tests of reader comprehension and memory after reading is completed; and (b) investigations of the internal mental processes that individuals engage in as they read a text.