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Eye movements of skilled and less skilled readers were monitored as they read sentences containing a target word. The boundary paradigm was used such that when their eyes crossed an invisible boundary location, a preview word changed to the target word. The preview could either be identical to the target word (beach as a preview for beach), a homophone of the target word (beech as a preview for beach), an orthographic control (bench as a preview for beach), or an unrelated consonant string (jfzrp as a preview for beach). Consistent with prior research, skilled readers obtained more preview benefit from the homophone preview than from the orthographic preview. The less skilled readers, however, did not show such an effect. The results indicate that less skilled readers do not use phonological codes to integrate information across eye movements. Indeed, the results also indicate that less skilled readers do not show normal preview benefit effects.

In a series of three experiments, we examined how sentential and discourse contexts were used by adults who are learning to read compared with skilled adult readers. In Experiment 1, participants read sentence contexts that were either congruent, incongruent or neutral with respect to a target word they had to name. Both skilled and less skilled adults benefited from a congruent context, and were not disadvantaged by an incongruent context. Contrary to research conducted on children learning to read, skill level of the adult reader did not interact with context. Experiments 2 and 3 tested readers' ability to make predictive inferences. Again, all readers, regardless of skill level, provided evidence that they were making predictive inferences. This finding is inconsistent with research that has examined individual differences in college readers.As a complicated national problem that lacks widespread attention, adult literacy warrants high priority. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (US Department of Education, 2003), 43% of adults in the United States, or approximately 130 million Americans, are unable to perform basic reading tasks. In stark contrast to the weight of the problem, little research has been conducted to describe the reading behaviour of the functionally illiterate adult population. A few recent studies on adult learners have revealed that adults differ from children in some aspects of basic word recognition skill (e.g. Greenberg, Ehri & Perin, 1997Thompkins & Binder, 2003). While the studies that have examined word recognition processes in this population have tended to look at word recognition in isolation, there is little data regarding the interplay between word recognition and comprehension skill in this group of readers. Particularly for adult learners, this points to the need to focus research efforts on the relationship between decoding/word recognition skills and higher-level comprehension processes. The purpose of this study was to assess how context, both sentential and discourse information, is processed by adults who are learning to read compared with skilled adult readers. Sentence contextMuch research has examined how context is used in word identification for adult skilled

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