Two experiments examined whether normal and disabled readers differed in the ability to use orthographic structure information to process printed material. Experiment 1 required subjects to search for a target letter in a six-letter stimulus array held in memory. Experiment 2 required subjects to make word-nonword decisions. Stimulus arrays for both experiments were words and nonwords varying in orthographic regularity and positional frequency. The results of Experiment 1 showed that both disabled and normal readers were able to perform the memory search task more accurately for letter strings high in either type of orthographic structure. In Experiment 2, disabled and younger normal readers produced decision times reflecting greater sensitivity than older normal readers to orthographic regularity. The finding that disabled readers use orthographic structure information to the same extent, and, under some circumstances, to a greater extent than normal readers supports the interactive-compensatory model of reading proposed by Stanovich (1980).
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