Toward an Interactive-Compensatory Model of Individual Differences in the Development of Reading Fluency

INTERACTIVE MODELS OF READING appear to provide a more accurate conceptualization of reading performance than do strictly top-down or bottom-up models. When combined with an assumption of compensatory processing (that a deficit in any particular process will result in a greater reliance on other knowledge sources, regardless of their level in the processing hierarchy), interactive models provide a better account of the existing data on the use of orthographic structure and sentence context by good and poor readers. A review of the research literature seems to indicate that, beyond the initial stages of reading acquisition, superior reading ability is not associated with a greater tendency to use the redundancy inherent in natural language to speed word recognition. Instead, general comprehension strategies and rapid context-free word recognition appear to be the processes that most clearly distinguish good from poor readers.