Abstract
Picture-word interference tasks were used to examine the relationship between reading achievement and the automatic recognition of familiar and less familiar words and pseudowords. Superimposed upon pictures (line drawings) were pronounceable nonwords (pseudowords), letter strings, and sets of words which varied over four levels of difficulty, from first-grade nouns to fourth-and fifth-grade nouns. The results of this study indicate that achieving (n = 60) and nonachieving (n = 60) fourth-grade readers show similar automatic recognition of both familiar and less familiar words. As the words increased in difficulty, interference with picture naming decreased for readers in both groups. Interference from pseudowords was evident for only the achieving readers, an indication that automatic recoding skills had not yet been attained by the nonachieving readers.
