Words cannot be recognized quickly enough to group together into logical units in working memory, and text becomes a string of words, rather than a string of ideas. Slow reading impairs comprehension, just as looking at a famous painting though a pinhole in a card may not allow one to identify what you are seeing, or hearing 2 second snippets of a song may not allow one to identify it. Finally, spelling is affected. Rapid Digit Naming and Rapid Letter Naming , which form the Rapid Naming Composite, are new standardized measures from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing. Basic reading consists of word attack and word identification skills, from which a basic reading index is computed.
Word attack is a measure of the ability to read unknown words.
Also called phonemic or alphabetic reading, word attack is the single most reliable predictor of future growth in basic reading skills. Word identification is an estimate of the store of words that the student can read relatively quickly. The Basic Reading Cluster is computed from word attack and word identification. Good word attack and word identification are necessary for reading accuracy, the first step toward reading proficiency. Because both George and the second-grader have word attack skills at the 2.0 grade level, each has the same statistical probability of correctly reading the new words of the textbook.