Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; n[subscript female] = 264,…

This study investigated the developmental time course of spoken word recognition in older children using eye tracking to assess how the real-time processing dynamics of word recognition change over development. We found that 9-year-olds were slower to activate the target words and showed more early competition from competitor words than…