Visual Attention Strategies for Printed Words in Beginning Readers

Abstract

To investigate beginning readers' multiple and selective attention to letter and configural information in printed words, Garner's speeded classification task was administered to 20 children after one year of formal reading instruction. There were individual differences, but, in general, the beginning readers imposed configural structures (failure in multiple and selective attention) and separable structures (failure in multiple attention only). No one structure was associated with achievement or underachievement in reading, based on standardized tests and teachers' judgment. That 70% of the underachievers and only 20% of the achievers used the same structure for both words (which can be recoded linguistically) and word analogues (which cannot be recoded linguistically), suggests that achievers may be more flexible in allocating visual attention. Another finding, which was replicated, indicates that configural information may be salient for beginning readers who ate learning rules of letter-phoneme correspondence. On orthogonal-dimensions tasks the beginning readers (achieving and underachieving) selectively ignored letter but not configural information.