CONCEPTS IN DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES OF READING SKILL - COGNITIVE RESOURCES, AUTOMATICITY, AND MODULARITY

The concept of limited cognitive resources loomed large in reading theory for a considerable period, largely due to the impact of LaBerge and Samuels' influential automaticity theory. However, experiments that attempted to trace the development of automatic word recognition processes generated empirical paradoxes because the different criteria employed to operationalize the automaticity concept did not display convergent validity. For example, the development of obligatory processing did not completely coincide with the development of capacity-free processing. Recently, developmental reading theories have deemphasized the capacity component of the automaticity concept and have focused on another property: information encapsulation. The latter property is the centerpiece of the concept of modularity in cognitive science, a theoretical notion only partially overlapping with automaticity. Most current conceptions of the development of reading skill emphasize issues of the quality of lexical representations and information encapsulation-conceptions thought to be more empirically tractable than resource notions, given the history of methodological and theoretical complications involving the latter. © 1990.