Information Processing Correlates of Reading JOHN PALMER COLIN M. MACLEOD EARLHUNT AND JANET E. DAVIDSON Individual differences in reading correlate with individual differences in perception. in memory, and in other simple processes. This study measured these relationships using information processing tasks such as visual search. visual matching, and span of apprehen- \ion; and using linguistic processing tasks such as word-nonword judgment, picture-sen- tence verification. and semantic Categorization. These tasks were performed by a large sample of college students chosen to represent the full range of college-level reading ability. Three salient findings emerged: (a) Reading correlate5 with the information processing mea- sures when they involve words, but it does not correlate with otherwise identical measures involving letters. (b) Reading speed and comprehension have different correlations with the information processing measures, although they have similar correlations with the linguistic processing measures. (c) Reading speed is only moderately correlated with listening com- prehension. but reading comprehension ability is indistinguishable from listening compre- hension ability. These results indicate that reading speed and comprehension depend on abilities that are at least partly distinct. Specifically, reading speed varies with visual word processing. while reading comprehension varies with nonvisual linguistic processing. Thib research was supported by National Institute of Education Grant G77-0012 to the University of Washington. Preparation of the paper was supported by GI-ant A7459 from Natural Sciences and Engi- neering Research Council of Canada. We are grateful IO the following people for their contributions: Steven Poltrock for early contributions to the ideas: Susan (‘hipman. John Jonides. John Kounios. Marcy I.anbman. David Meyer, Steve Yantis, Zelda Zabinsky. and anonymous reviewers for critical com- ment\ on earlier drafts; Joy Taylor for compiling the reading speed test; and Colene McKee for as&tance with programming and data analybis. We also thank David Meyer for providing his material5 for the lexical decision task. and Frank Andrews for statistical ad- Lice. Requests for reprints may be sent to Earl Hunt. Department of Psychology, NI-25, University of Wa\hlng:ton. Seattle. Wash. 98195. There are wide individual differences in the reading skills of college students. For example, Perfetti (1984) estimates differ- ences in reading speed of as much as 4 to 1 and similar differences in comprehension. To account for these individual differences, one can consider variation in three classes of processes: (a) processes analyzing the vi- sual aspects of individual words and sen- tences. (b) processes integrating informa- tion presented at different points in a text, and (c) processes relating information in a text to general world knowledge (Freder- iksen, 1982). This paper is concerned with the first class, that of elementary informa-