DETECTION ERRORS ON WORD - EVIDENCE FOR ACQUISITION OF READING LEVELS

The Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021 The pattern of detection errors on the word the 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 word the 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 on the 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. © 1978 Psychonomic Society, Inc.