Letter, Word, and Text Reading Times of Precocious and Average Readers

Abstract

JACKSON, NANCY EWALD, and BIEMILLER, ANDREW J. Letter, Word, and Text Reading Times of Precocious and Average Readers. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 196-206. Measures of letter, scrambled word, and text reading time were administered to kindergarten-age precocious readers (N = 97) whose mean comprehension ability was at the third-grade level and to representative samples of children of second-grade age (90 or 96 months, N = 66) and third-grade age (102 or 108 months, N = 62). Within each group, letter naming and scrambled word reading times were correlated with text reading times. However, none of the reading time measures was strongly associated with precocious readers' scores on a multiple-choice test of sentence reading comprehension. The precocious group named letters less rapidly than second graders did, but read words at the same speed as second graders and text faster. Comparisons of the precocious and third-grade groups showed a similar pattern, that is, precocious readers were most like third graders in text reading time and least like them in letter naming time. There were no significant grade x task interactions in any comparison between the secondand third-grade groups. The results are interpreted as evidence that, for precocious readers, efficiency in executing lower-order tasks (letter naming and individual word identificationi is a facilitative but not a prerequisite condition for rapid text reading and good comprehension.