Lexical Expertise and Reading Skill

Abstract

Abstract This chapter overviews a research program assessing the lexical expertise hypothesis of reading skill which assumes that the critical, specific determinant of written language proficiency is an “expert lexicon” characterized by precise, redundant, lexical representations that support efficient, autonomous, lexical retrieval (Perfetti, 1992). Evidence for the precision and redundancy of skilled readers’ lexical representations is provided by investigations of the masked priming and rhyme judgment performance of university student readers categorized on reading comprehension and spelling performance. Lexical experts, defined by the combination of good reading and good spelling, were more efficient at lexical classification and more sensitive to orthographic–phonological relationships, but less susceptible to priming and interference from orthographically similar stimuli. Further experiments used rapid serial visual presentation sentence paradigms to investigate functional autonomy of skilled readers’ lexical retrieval. Better readers were more efficient at selecting the sentence-congruent meaning of a homographic word in a probe memory task but less susceptible to biasing sentence context when the task required accurate identification of sentence-incongruent words and nonwords. These findings support the view that better readers’ higher quality lexical representations allow them to more effectively integrate bottom–up and top–down information and tailor their processing to task demands.