Number 5 was especially interesting to me, Dr. Bill. It is, in part:
"Skilled reading involves using syntactic and semantic cues to "guess" words..." A man named Ken Goodman did a dissertation on this assertion, which the author says he and a partner debunked--er, disproved. One of the author's sticking points in Mr. Goodman's theory was, essentially, what constitutes a "good" reader.
My interest was caught by this one because I do a fair amount of this type of guesswork. Although not a 'speed reader', I do read fairly fast. If my glance notes that, say, a word of approximately seven letters begins with ri--and ends with --ly, I will likely assume the word is rightly (depending on context), and sometimes I do miss things. When I was helping in elementary classrooms, I saw some kids doing the same thing; they'd make a guess based on the beginning of a word.
I wonder if this isn't partially innate, and partially based on experience. With as much reading experience as I have now, I know that the odds are heavily in favor of a particular word being in a particular place. To use my example, the odds tell me that if I see the phrase, "... and ri---ly so", the middle word is rightly. And I think it is possible, and likely, that some children** see a word that begins with the letter, say m, and think, "Oh, that's got to be that word that I learned the other day that begins with m". We extrapolate for the future based on our experiences: what we know. An example of this came from my son: when he was just learning to talk, we went to the zoo. The first animal we came to was a goat. And to him, every animal we saw thereafter was a goat, so matter how wildly its appearance varied from the original.
As to innateness, I meant something I've posted about before: we seem to be hard-wired so that we remember first things (letters of words fits this post) easiest, last things second-easiest, and have a hard time with the middles. Think of the alphabet, and the multiplication tables.
**I have almost no experience in helping adults learn to read. Does anyone know if adults may be less likely to jump to a conclusion about what a word is?
