Explaining developmental dyslexia : Orthographic processing difficulties

Fluent readers process text at a number of levels; at the word, the sentence, the conceptual and the topic levels (Munro & Munro, 1991, 1994). The outputs from each process are retained for varying durations in short-term working memory. Depending in part on their purposes for reading at any time, readers perceive the outputs of some levels to be more useful than those at other levels. As they read, they move between the various levels in ways that would be difficult to map in a general sense They may, for example, begin by processing a few words in a text to gain an initial impression of its likely topic, making use of their existing knowledge. They may then return to modify this initial topic level impression after working at the word and sentence levels. Sentence level processing can facilitate word level processing by assisting readers to anticipate words within a sentence, thus contributing to word level processes within the sentence.