Abstract
The Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021 The pattern of detection errors on the wordthe made by groups of school children and adults searching four 25-word passages for instances of the target letter t was found to depend on the subjects’ reading ability as well as on the orthographic, syntactic, and semantic con-straints of the search passages. The conditional percentage of errors on the wordthe made by children reading at first-grade level was no different from that expected on the basis of chance for any of the four passages. Disproportionately more errors onthe were made on the prose and scrambled-word passages by children reading at second-grade level and above and by adults, with the difference between the prose and scrambled-word passages being significant only for the most fluent readers. These results are consistent with a multilevel model of reading, and are taken to support the hypothesis that reading-processing skills at various levels are acquired at different rates.
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This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant GB 41176 and National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH 23878 to the Rockefeller University.
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Drewnowski, A. Detection errors on the wordthe: Evidence for the acquisition of reading levels. Memory & Cognition 6, 403–409 (1978). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197472
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197472