Attentional Resource Emancipation: Toward Understanding the Interaction of Word Identification and Comprehension Processes in Reading

Research on the basic processes of early reading and research on reading comprehension has developed with less than optimal overlap and intercommunication. Indeed, some would say that these two research areas have developed almost independently. This lack of overlap has created knowledge gaps for scholars who wish to address and model the reading process in its entirety. The purpose of this article is to begin to address this problem by giving a brief overview of the development of reading comprehension research over the past 25 years. I discuss in more depth the notion of executive (metacognitive) control in the reading and learning processes and suggest an idea-the emancipation of attentional resources by the automatization of lower level word identification and higher level basic comprehension skills-that might prove useful as a connecting point among basic process, comprehension, and metacognitive research. The article concludes with a series of suggestions as to the types of research questions that must be answered if a comprehensive model of the reading process is to be created.