Some context

A brief history of models

Reading research is just a little more than a hundred years old. In fact, it was the year 1879 when Emile Javal published his first paper on eye movements; James McKeen Cattell s still-cited paper on seeing and naming letters versus words was published in 1886. Surprisingly, serious attempts at building explicit models of the reading process – models that describe the entire process from the time the eye meets the page until the reader experiences the “click of comprehension” – have a history of a little more than thirty years.

This is not to say that early reading researchers were not concerned about all aspects of the reading process or that there were no scholarly pieces from which a model could be deduced fairly easily. It is perhaps more accurate to speculate that until the mid-1950s and the 1960s, there simply was not a strong tradition of attempting to conceptualize knowledge and theory about the reading process in the form of explicit reading models.

There are a variety of factors that account for the observed burst in model-building activity from, say, 1965 to the present. Surely the changes that occurred in language research and the psychological study of mental processes played a major role by elevating reading research to a more respectable stature. Just as surely, the advent of what has come to be known as the psycholinguistic perspective (Goodman 1967/1976, 1970; Smith 1971) pushed the field to consider underlying assumptions about basic processes in reading, as did a geometrically accelerating body of empirical evidence about basic processes….