Good and poor readers from the second and fourth grades read words which varied in length from 3 to 6 letters under three exposure conditions; context, miscue and no-context. Word recognition latency for the nouns in each word length category was recorded. An increase in latency relative to word length would suggest component-letter processing, while no increase would suggest holistic processing. Results indicated that under all conditions poor second grade readers used holistic processing. Poor fourth grade readers used holistic processing with context but component-letter processing in no-context and miscue conditions. These findings suggest that the size of the word recognition unit is sensitive to reader skill and context condition.
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