Investigating the reading processes captured by he missing-letter effect

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When asked to count or cross out the letter f in a sentence or paragraph like: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF MANY YEARS, people have greater difficulty detecting target letters in function than in content words. This is known as the missing-letter effect. In the example above, there are six fs, but most readers have difficulty finding the three fs in of. This is partly due because the f in of is pronounced as a v, but most importantly because it is a function word that carries little meaning. For instance, the same pattern of results is observed when f is pronounced the same in function and content words with more omissions when it is embedded in the function word for than in content words like fun, far, and fig (Saint-Aubin & Klein, 2001). The missing-letter effect has been used for more than four decades as a window on the cognitive processes involved in reading continuous text. The long-term goal of my research program is to better understand the basic reading processes. The short-term objectives of this proposal are to investigate the reading processes captured by the missing-letter effect in light of a new model we recently proposed: the Attentional Disengagement model of the missing-letter effect (Roy-Charland et al., 2007). According to this hypothesis, omissions are due to the allocation of attention on text by reading processes and to the efficiency of the detection process. Readers will be more likely to miss a target letter in a function than a content word because they will rapidly stop paying attention to the former. With my students, we will systematically test the new hypothesis with a variety of methodologies. First, we will investigate the nature of the information scanned by readers by varying the target to be detected. Second, we will investigate how good and poor readers differ at the letter search task by isolating the contribution of their reading and of their detection skills. Third, we will investigate the communalities between reading and listening for comprehension.