Revisiting the Contextual Information Available to Readers Reading

Abstract

This research investigates the ability of adult proficient readers to predict words that have been fully or partially deleted, without being able to read what came after the blank. Predictions were analyzed for accuracy and if inaccurate for their grammatical nature, syntactic and semantic acceptability, and retention of the author's meaning. Finally, the sentence and text location of the deletion were determined. Findings indicate that readers were more accurate in their predictions than commonly reported in the research and the significant saliency of beginning letter as advocated by some reading theorists. It also was discovered that various factors impacted the accuracy of readers' predictions such as the grammatical nature of the word (beyond the typical content vs. function word distinction), and its location in the sentence and the text. Given these findings, it may be the case that readers utilize whatever necessary information a text makes available and that the density or selectivity of the processing is very much text dependent.

Keywords:

• adult readers
• fluency