What a Simple Letter-Detection Task Can Tell Us About Cognitive Processes in Reading
Abstract
Understanding reading is a central issue for psychology, with major societal implications. Over the past five decades, a
simple letter-detection task has been used as a window on the psycholinguistic processes involved in reading. When
readers are asked to read a text for comprehension while marking with a pencil all instances of a target letter, they miss
some of the letters in a systematic way known as the missing-letter effect. In the current article, we review evidence from
studies that have emphasized neuroimaging, eye movement, rapid serial visual presentation, and auditory passages. As
we review, the missing-letter effect captures a wide variety of cognitive processes, including lexical activation, attention,
and extraction of phrase structure. To account for the large set of findings generated by studies of the missing-letter
effect, we advanced an attentional-disengagement model that is rooted in how attention is allocated to and disengaged
from lexical items during reading, which we have recently shown applies equally to listening.
Citation
Published version: Klein, R. M., & Saint-Aubin, J. (2016). What a simple letter detection task can tell us about cognitive processes in reading. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 25:6, 417-424. doi:10.1177/0963721416661173