The influence of reading skills on the missing-letter effect among elementary school students

Saint-Aubin, J., & Klein, R.M. (2008). The influence of reading skills on the missing-letter effect among elementary school students. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 132-145.


I can’t say I actually “got” this article. I learned about a phenomenon, “the missing letter effect” that I had never heard of before. With this effect, when readers are told to circle words with a certain letter in them in a text they are reading simultaneously for comprehension, readers will omit function words like "the" more than content words like "teacher" or even "mother" (with the target letter being t, for example). This effect is greater for “good” readers, especially at an early point in literacy development, than it is for “poor” readers. Several theories on why this occurs are outlined, and the results of a study done with elementary-age kids in the Canadian province of New Brunswick are used to support the existence of this effect.

I guess the idea is to shed some light on the remarkably complex and fascinating process that is reading. I found myself wishing the authors had drawn some parallels to “real,” everyday reading, but they didn’t. So, I had a hard time connecting these findings to actual practice.