Second and fifth-grade and college-age subjects made similarity judgments on sets of three words that required attention to orthographic, phonetic, or semantic information. Accuracy and speed increased with age. Even the youngest subjects were able to perform the task of selecting a given feature of a word reasonably well. Differences in difficulty among the three tasks decreased with age, suggesting a developmental change (primarily between second and fifth grade) toward facility in extracting phonetic and semantic information from words. The presence of confusable, potentially relevant information had detrimental effects overall which decreased with age and varied with the type of task and type of distractor. For all ages, performance was better when all trials of a particular task were blocked together than when trials of the three tasks were randomly ordered. 88Printed words offer several types of information: semantic and morphological, syntactic, graphic and orthographic, and phonetic. Gibson (1971) has called these types feature classes. When reading, one's purpose determines which class of information is most relevant. Although we generally read for meaning, we may focus on orthography when correcting papers or looking up a name in the phone book, and on sound when reading poetry. Performing any of these tasks requires the ability to extract and work with one class of information in preference to another.The present study is concerned with the development of selective attention to particular classes of information offered by printed words. It has been established that 7-year-olds can attend selectively to graphic distinctive features in a search task, using strategies similar to those of adults (Gibson & Yonas, 1966), and that they can perform some types of phonemic analysis (Golden, Note 1). The present study provides a more complete test of readers' abilities to work with specific classes of information. Children of two grade levels and college students
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