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ANNE E. CUNNINGHAM and KEITH E.

STANOVICH

What Reading Does for the Mind


Anne E. Cunningham is visiting associate professor in cognition and development in the graduate school of education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the cognitive and motivational processes that underlie reading ability and the cognitive consequences of reading skill and engagement. Keith E. Stanovich is professor of applied psychology at the University of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. His recent awards include the Sylvia Scribner Award from the American Educational Research Association and the Oscar S. Causey Award from the National Research Conference for his distinguished and substantial contributions to literacy research. This research was supported by a Spencer Foundation Small Grant to Anne E. Cunningham and grant No. 410-95-0315 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Keith E. Stanovich.

Reading has cognitive consequences that extend beyond its immediate task of lifting meaning from a particular passage. Furthermore, these consequences are reciprocal and exponential in nature. Accumulated over timespiraling either upward or downwardthey carry profound implications for the development of a wide range of cognitive capabilities. Concern about the reciprocal influences of reading achievement has been elucidated through discussions of so-called Matthew effects in academic achievement (Stanovich, 1986; Walberg & Tsai, 1983). The term Matthew effects is taken from the Biblical passage that describes a rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer phenomenon. Applying this
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concept to reading, we see that very early in the reading process poor readers, who experience greater difficulty in breaking the spellingto-sound code, begin to be exposed to much less text than their more skilled peers (Allington, 1984; Biemiller, 19771978). Further exacerbating the problem is the fact that less-skilled readers often find themselves in materials that are too difficult for them (Allington, 1977, 1983, 1984; Gambrell, Wilson, & Gantt, 1981). The combination of deficient decoding skills, lack of practice, and difficult materials results in unrewarding early reading experiences that lead to less involvement in reading-related activities. Lack of exposure and practice on the part of the lessskilled reader delays the development of automaticity and speed at the word recognition level. Slow, capacity-draining word recognition processes require cognitive resources that should be allocated to comprehension. Thus, reading for meaning is hindered; unrewarding reading experiences multiply; and practice is avoided or merely tolerated without real cognitive involvement. The disparity in the reading experiences of children of varying skill may have many other consequences for their future reading and cognitive development. As skill develops and word recog-

Journal of Direct Instruction, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 137149. Reprinted with permission from The American Federation of Teachers. American Educator, Vol. 22, No. 12, pp. 815. Address correspondence to Anne E. Cunningham and Keith E. Stanovich at acunning@socretes.berkeley.edu.

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nition becomes less resource demanding and more automatic, more general language skills, such as vocabulary, background knowledge, familiarity with complex syntactic structures, etc., become the limiting factor on reading ability (Chall, 1983; Sticht, 1979). But the sheer volume of reading done by the better reader has the potential to provide an advantage even here ifas our research suggestsreading a lot serves to develop these very skills and knowledge bases (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Echols, West, Stanovich, & Zehr, 1996; Stanovich & Cunningham, 1992, 1993). From the standpoint of a reciprocal model of reading development, this means that many cognitive differences observed between readers of differing skill may in fact be consequences of differential practice that itself resulted from early differences in the speed of initial reading acquisition. The increased reading experiences of children who master the spelling-to-sound code early thus might have important positive feedback effects that are denied the slowly progressing reader. In our research, we have begun to explore these reciprocal effects by examining the role that reading volume plays in shaping the mind and will share many of our findings in this article. We should say at the outset that the complexity of some of the work we will describe in this article was necessitated in large part by the fact that it is difficult to tease apart the unique contribution that reading volume affords. One of the difficulties is that levels of reading volume are correlated with many other cognitive and behavioral characteristics. Avid readers tend to be different from nonreaders on a wide variety of cognitive skills, behavioral habits, and background variables (Guthrie, Schafer, & Hutchinson, 1991; Kaestle, 1991; Zill & Winglee, 1990). Attributing any particular outcome to reading volume is thus extremely difficult.
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Theoretical Reasons to Expect Positive Cognitive Consequences from Reading Volume


In certain very important cognitive domains, there are strong theoretical reasons to expect a positive and unique effect of avid reading. Vocabulary development provides a case in point. Most theorists are agreed that the bulk of vocabulary growth during a childs lifetime occurs indirectly through language exposure rather than through direct teaching (Miller & Gildea, 1987; Nagy & Anderson, 1984; Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985; Sternberg, 1985, 1987). Furthermore, many researchers are convinced that reading volume, rather than oral language, is the prime contributor to individual differences in childrens vocabularies (Hayes, 1988; Hayes & Ahrens, 1988; Nagy & Anderson, 1984; Nagy & Herman, 1987; Stanovich, 1986). The theoretical reasons for believing that reading volume is a particularly effective way of expanding a childs vocabulary derive from the differences in the statistical distributions of words that have been found between print and oral language. Some of these differences are illustrated in Table 1, which displays the results of some of the research of Hayes and Ahrens (1988), who have analyzed the distributions of words used in various contexts. The table illustrates the three different categories of language that were analyzed: written language sampled from genres as difficult as scientific articles and as simple as preschool books; words spoken on television shows of various types; and adult speech in two contexts varying in formality. The words used in the different contexts were analyzed according to a standard frequency count of English (Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971). This frequency count ranks
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the 86,741 different word forms in English according to their frequency of occurrence in a large corpus of written English. So, for example, the word the is ranked number 1, the 10th most frequent word is it, the word know is ranked 100, the word pass is ranked 1,000, the word vibrate is 5,000th in frequency, the word shrimp is 9,000th in frequency, and the word amplifier is 16,000th in frequency. The first column, labeled Rank of Median Word, is simply the frequency rank of the average word (after a small correction) in each of the categories. So, for example, the average word in childrens books was ranked 627th most frequent in the Carroll et al. word count; the average word in popular magazines was ranked 1,399th most frequent; and the average word in the abstracts of scientific articles had, not surprisingly, a very low rank (4,389). What is immediately apparent is how lexically impoverished is most speech, as compared to written language. With the exception of the special situation of courtroom testimony, average frequency of the words in all the samples of oral speech is quite low, hovering in the 400600 range of ranks. The relative rarity of the words in childrens books is, in fact, greater than that in all of the adult conversation, except for the courtroom testimony. Indeed, the words used in childrens books are considerably rarer than those in the speech on prime-time adult television. The categories of adult reading matter contain words that are two or three times rarer than those heard on television. These relative differences in word rarity have direct implications for vocabulary development. If most vocabulary is acquired outside of formal teaching, then the only opportunities to acquire new words occur when an individual is exposed to a word in written or oral language that is outside his/her current vocabulary. That this will happen vastly more often while reading than
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while talking or watching television is illustrated in the second column of Table 1. The column lists how many rare words per 1000 are contained in each of the categories. A rare word is defined as one with a rank lower than 10,000; roughly a word that is outside the vocabulary of a fourth to sixth grader. For vocabulary growth to occur after the middle grades, children must be exposed to words that are rare by this definition. Again, it is print that provides many more such word-learning opportunities. Childrens

Table 1

Selected Statistics for Major Sources of Spoken and Written Language (Sample Means)
Rank Rare of Words Median per Word l000 I. Printed texts Abstracts of scientific articles Newspapers Popular magazines Adult books Comic books Childrens books Preschool books II. Television texts Popular prime-time adult shows Popular prime-time childrens shows Cartoon shows Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street III. Adult speech Expert witness testimony College graduates to friends, spouses
Adapted from Hayes and Ahrens (1988).

4389 1690 1399 1058 867 627 578

128.0 68.3 65.7 52.7 53.5 30.9 16.3

490 543 598 413

22.7 20.2 30.8 2.0

1008 496

28.4 17.3

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books have 50 percent more rare words in them than does adult prime-time television and the conversation of college graduates. Popular magazines have roughly three times as many opportunities for new word learning as does prime time television and adult conversation. Assurances by some educators that What they read and write may make people smarter, but so will any activity that engages the mind, including interesting conversation (Smith, 1989) are overstated, at least when applied to the domain of vocabulary learning. The data in Table 1 indicate that conversation is not a substitute for reading. It is sometimes argued or implied that the type of words present in print but not represented in speech are unnecessary wordsjargon, academic doublespeak, elitist terms of social advantage, or words used to maintain the status of the users but that serve no real functional purpose. A consideration of the frequency distributions

of written and spoken words reveals this argument to be patently false. Table 2 presents a list of words that do not occur at all in two large corpora of oral language (Berger, 1977; Brown, 1984), but that have appreciable frequencies in a written frequency count (Francis & Kucera, 1982). The words participation, luxury, maneuver, provoke, reluctantly, relinquish, portray, equate, hormone, exposure, display, invariably, dominance, literal, legitimate, and infinite are not unnecessary appendages, concocted to exclude those who are unfamiliar with them. They are words that are necessary to make critical distinctions in the physical and social world in which we live. Without such lexical tools, one will be severely disadvantaged in attaining ones goals in an advanced society such as ours. As Olson (1986) notes: It is easy to show that sensitivity to the subtleties of language are crucial to some undertakings. A person who does not clearly see the difference between an expression of intention and a promise or between a mistake and an accident, or between a falsehood and a lie, should avoid a legal career or, for that matter, a theological one. The large differences in lexical richness between speech and print are a major source of individual differences in vocabulary development. These differences are created by the large variability among children in exposure to literacy. Table 3 presents the data from a study of the out-of-school time use by fifth graders conducted by Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988). From diaries that the children filled out daily over several months time, the investigators estimated how many minutes per day that individuals were engaged in reading and other activities while not in school. The table indicates that the child at the 50th percentile in amount of independent reading was reading approximately 4.6 minutes per day, or about a half an hour per week, over six times as much as the child at the 20th percentile in amount of
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Table 2

Examples of words that do not appear in two large corpora of oral language (Berger, 1977; Brown, 1984) but that have appreciable frequencies in written texts (Carroll, Davies & Richman, 1971; Francis & Kucera, 1982):
display dominance dominant exposure equate equation gravity hormone infinite invariably literal legitimate luxury maneuver participation portray provoke relinquish reluctantly

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reading time (less than a minute daily). Or, to take another example, the child at the 80th percentile in amount of independent reading time (14.2 minutes) was reading over twenty times as much as the child at the 20th percentile. Anderson et al. (1988) estimated the childrens reading rates and used these, in conjunction with the amount of reading in minutes per day, to extrapolate a figure for the number of words that the children at various percentiles were reading. These figures, presented in the far right of the table, illustrate the enormous differences in word exposure that are generated by childrens differential proclivities toward reading. For example, the average child at the 90th percentile reads almost two million words per year outside of school, more than 200 times more words than the child at the 10th percentile, who reads just 8,000 words outside of school during a year. To put it another way, the entire years out-of-school reading for the child at the 10th percentile amounts to just two days reading for the child at the 90th percentile! These dramatic differences, combined with the lexical richness of print, act to create large vocabulary differences among children.

even more potent source of the rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer achievement patterns. Therefore, we have sought to examine the unique contribution that independent or out-ofschool reading makes toward reading ability, aspects of verbal intelligence, and general knowledge about the world. As part of this research program, our research group has pioneered the use of a measure of reading volume that has some unique advantages in investigations of this kind (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1990; Stanovich and West, 1989). In all, we developed two measures of adults reading volume and one for childrens reading volume. Briefly, the childrens measure, named the Title Recognition Test (TRT), requires children to pick out the titles of popular childrens books from a list of titles that includes

Table 3

Variation in Amount of Independent Reading


Independent Reading Minutes Per Day 65.0 21.1 14.2 9.6 6.5 4.6 3.2 1.3 0.7 0.1 0.0 Words Read Per Year

Examining the Consequences of Differential Degrees of Reading Volume


It is one thing to speculate on how these differences in reading volume may result in specific cognitive consequences in domains like vocabulary; it is another to demonstrate that these effects are occurring. In our research, we have sought empirical evidence for the specific effects of reading volume, effects that do not simply result from the higher cognitive abilities and skills of the more avid reader. Although there are considerable differences in amount of reading volume in school, it is likely that differences in out-of-school reading volume are an
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% 98 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 2

4,358,000 1,823,000 1,146,000 622,000 432,000 282,000 200,000 106,000 21,000 8,000 0

Adapted from Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988).

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equal numbers of made-up titles. This task is easy to administer to large numbers of children, it does not make large cognitive demands, and its results are reliableit is not possible for children to distort their responses toward what they perceive as socially desirable answers. Because the number of wrong answers can be counted against correct ones, it is possible to remove the effects of guessing from the results (see Cunningham & Stanovich, 1990; 1991; and Stanovich and West, 1989 for a full description of these instruments and a discussion of the logic behind them). The adults measures, named the Author Recognition and Magazine Recognition Test, have the same task requirements and are described fully in Stanovich and West (1989). A score on the Title Recognition Test, of course, is not an absolute measure of childrens reading volume and previous literacy experiences, but it does provide us with an index of the relative differences in reading volume. This index enables us to ask what effects reading volume (rather than general reading comprehension and word decoding ability) has on intelligence, vocabulary, spelling, and childrens general knowledge. In short, it enables us to ask the question, does readingin and of itselfshape the quality of our mind? The titles appearing on the TRT were selected from a sample of book titles generated in pilot investigations by groups of children ranging in age from second grade through high school. In selecting the items that appear on any one version of the TRT, an attempt was made to choose titles that were not prominent parts of classroom reading activities in these particular schools. Because we wanted the TRT to probe out-of-school rather than school-directed reading, an attempt was made to choose titles that were not used in the school curriculum. In our technical reports on this work, we have used a powerful statistical technique known as
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hierarchical multiple regression to solve the interpretive problem that avid readers excel in most domains of verbal learning and that, therefore, our measures of reading volume might be spuriously correlated to a host of abilities (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1990, 1991; Stanovich & Cunningham, 1992, 1993; Stanovich & West, 1989). We have found that even when performance is statistically equated for reading comprehension and general ability, reading volume is still a very powerful predictor of vocabulary and knowledge differences. Thus, we believe that reading volume is not simply an indirect indicator of ability; it is actually a potentially separable, independent source of cognitive differences.

Reading Volume as a Contributor to Growth in Verbal Skills


In several studies, we have attempted to link childrens reading volume to specific cognitive outcomes after controlling for relevant general abilities such as IQ. In a study of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children, we examined whether reading volume accounts for differences in vocabulary development once controls for both general intelligence and specific verbal abilities were invoked (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1991). We employed multiple measures of vocabulary and controlled for the effects of age and intelligence. We also controlled for the effect of another ability that may be more closely linked to vocabulary acquisition mechanisms: decoding ability. Decoding skill might mediate a relationship between reading volume and a variable like vocabulary size in numerous ways. High levels of decoding skill, certainly a contributor to greater reading volume, might provide relatively complete contexts for figuring out the meaning of words during reading. Thus, reading volume and vocabulary might be linked
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via their connection to decoding ability: Good decoders read a lot and have the best context available for inferring new words. This potential linkage was accounted for by statistically controlling for decoding ability prior to investigating reading volume. But we found that even after accounting for general intelligence and decoding ability, reading volume contributed significantly and independently to vocabulary knowledge in fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children. These findings demonstrate that reading volume, although clearly a consequence of developed reading ability, is itself a significant contributor to the development of other aspects of verbal intelligence. Such rich get-richer (and of course their converse, poor-get poorer) effects are becoming of increasing concern in the educational community (Adams, 1990; Chall, 1989) and are playing an increasingly prominent role in theories of individual differences in reading ability and growth (Anderson, et al., 1988; Chall, Jacobs, & Baldwin, 1990; Hayes, 1988; Hayes & Ahrens, 1988; Juel, 1988, 1994; Stanovich 1986, 1989, 1993). In a study we conducted involving college students, we employed an even more stringent test of whether reading volume is a unique predictor of verbal skill (Stanovich & Cunningham, 1992). In this study we examined many of the same variables as in our study of fourth- to sixth-grade students. However, we decided to stack the deck against reading volume by first removing any contribution of reading ability and general intelligence. By structuring the analyses in this way, we did not mean to imply that reading volume is not a determinant of reading comprehension ability. Indeed, we argue that there are grounds for believing that reading volume facilitates growth in comprehension ability. However, we wanted to construct the most conservative analysis possible by deliberately allowing the comprehension measure to steal some variance that is rightfully attributed to the measure of
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reading volume. The results of our study again attest to the potency of reading volume. We found that reading volume made a significant contribution to multiple measures of vocabulary, general knowledge, spelling, and verbal fluency even after reading comprehension ability and nonverbal ability had been partialed out. One way of demonstrating the conservative nature of these analyses is illustrated in a longitudinal study that we have conducted (Cipielewski & Stanovich, 1992). We addressed the question of whether reading volume can predict individual differences in growth in reading comprehension from third grade to fifth grade. We found that reading volume predicted variance in fifth-grade reading comprehension ability after third-grade reading comprehension scores had been removed. Thus, in removing the contribution of reading comprehension in our adult studies, we are undoubtedly removing some of the variance in variables such as vocabulary and general knowledge that is rightfully attributed to reading volume.

Reading Volume and Declarative Knowledge


In other studies, we have focused even more directly on content knowledge by addressing the issue of Where Does Knowledge Come From?. Stanovich and Cunningham (1993) examined general ability, reading volume, and exposure to other media sources as determinants of individual differences in content knowledge. This study contained a particularly stringent test of the role of reading volume and individual differences in knowledge acquisition among 268 college students. We administered five different measures of general knowledge to the students. Then we stacked the deck against reading volume once again by statistically entering four measures of general ability before looking at the contribution of reading volume: high
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school grade-point average, performance on an intelligence test, an SAT-type mathematics test, and an adult reading comprehension test. This set of tasks surely exhausts the variance attributable to any general ability construct; and, as one would expect, we found that general ability accounted for a substantial proportion of variance in the composite measure of general knowledge. Next we entered a composite measure of exposure to television, but it did not account for any additional variance. However, a composite index of reading volume accounted for a substantial 37.1 percent of the variance when entered after the four ability measures and television exposure. This pattern was replicated in each of the five measures of general knowledge we employed, including a homemade instrument we called the Practical Knowledge Test. This task was designed to address the criticism that our other measures of general knowledge were too academicthat they tapped knowledge that was too esoteric or elitist and that was not useful in daily life. We didnt think this was true; many items on these measures were mundane and concrete questions such as In what part of the body does the infection called pneumonia occur? Nevertheless, in the Practical Knowledge Test, we made an effort to devise questions that were directly relevant to daily living in a technological society in the late twentieth century; for example, What does the carburetor in an automobile do? If a substance is carcinogenic, it means that it is? After the Federal Reserve Board raises the prime lending rate, the interest that you will be asked to pay on a car loan will generally increase/decrease/ stay the same? What vitamin is highly concentrated in citrus fruits? When a stock exchange is in a bear market, what is happening? and so forth. The results indicated that the more avid readers in our studyregardless of their general abilitiesknew more about how a carburetor worked, were more likely to know who their United
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States senators were, more likely to know how many teaspoons are equivalent to one tablespoon, were more likely to know what a stroke was, and what a closed shop in a factory was, etc. One would be hard pressed to deny that at least some of this knowledge is relevant to living in the United States in the late 20th century. In other questions asked of these same students, we attempted to probe areas that we thought might be characterized by misinformation. We then attempted to trace the cognitive anatomy of this misinformation. One such question concerned the sizes of the worlds major religions and was designed to assess awareness of the multicultural nature of the modern world. The question was phrased as follows: The 1986 Encyclopedia Britannica estimates that there are approximately nine hundred million people in the world (not just the United States) who identify themselves as Christians. How many people in the world (not just the United States) do you think identify themselves as ? Space was then provided on the form for the subjects to make estimates of the number of Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. We will focus here on the estimates of Moslem and Jewish people because of our a priori hypothesis that availability effects caused by televised coverage of Israel in the U.S. had skewed the perception of this ratio. While our samples median estimate of the number of Jewish people (20 million) was quite close to the actual figure of 18 million according to the 1990 Universal Almanac, the number of estimated Moslemsa mean of 10 millionwas startlingly low (817 million is the estimate in the Universal Almanac). For each participant in our study, we calculated the ratio of the Moslem to Jewish estimates to see how many students were aware of the fact that the number of Moslems is an order of magnitude larger (the actual estimated ratio is approximately 33:1 according to the World Almanac; 45:1 according to the Universal
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Almanac). The median ratio in our sample was 0.5. That is, 69.3 percent of our sample thought that there were more Jewish people in the world than Moslems. This level of inaccuracy is startling given that approximately 40 percent of our sample of 268 students were attending one of the most selective public institutions of higher education in the United States (the University of California, Berkeley). We have explored the correlates of this particular misconception in a variety of ways. We looked at the performance on this question as a function of students level of reading volume and television watching. We observed a clear effect of reading volume on the scores on the question and a significant effect of television viewing, but the effects were in opposite directions! Reading volume was associated with higher scores on the question, but television exposure was associated with lower scores. Scores among the group high in reading volume and low in television exposure were highest, and the lowest scores were achieved by those high in television exposure and low in reading volume. Our analyses confirmed that these relationships were not due to differences in general ability. Similarly, we have analyzed a variety of other misconceptions in a number of other different domainsincluding knowledge of World War II, the worlds languages, and the components of the federal budgetand all of them replicate the pattern shown for this question. The cognitive anatomy of misinformation appears to be one of too little exposure to print (or reading) and over-reliance on television for information about the world. Although television viewing can have positive associations with knowledge when the viewing is confined to public television, news, and/or documentary material (Hall, Chiarello, & Edmondson, 1996; West & Stanovich, 1991; West et al., 1993), familiarity with the prime time television material that defines mass viewing in North
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America is most often negatively associated with knowledge acquisition. In another study, Stanovich, West, & Harrison (1995) examined a much older population in order to investigate the extent to which agerelated growth in knowledge can be accounted for by differences in reading volume. Although much research effort has been expended on describing cumulative growth in crystallized intelligence (e.g., acquired knowledge such as vocabulary and general information), we know little about the experiences that relate to knowledge growth in older individuals. For example, educational experience (years in school) is a predictor of intellectual functioning in older individuals (e.g., Schwartzman, Gold, Andres, Arbuckle, & Chaikelson, 1987). It is assumed that education (which is received early in life) in part determines the extent and quality of many intellectual activities later in life. And it is presumably this intellectual activity as one ages that is so crucial to the preservation of cognitive capacities. Thus, while considerable development of cognitive skills and abilities can result from formal educational experiences, it is the lifetime use of these skills that is assumed to have the beneficial effect. In this study, Stanovich, et al. (1995) examined the performance of college students and senior citizens on general knowledge, vocabulary, working memory, syllogistic reasoning, and several measures of reading volume. The older individuals outperformed the college students on the measures of general knowledge and vocabulary, but did significantly less well than the college subjects on the working memory and syllogistic reasoning tasks. This dissociation between fluid intelligence (all-purpose general problem-solving capacity) and crystallized intelligence (general knowledge and vocabulary) is a standard finding in the literature (Baltes, 1987; Horn & Hofer, 1992; Salthouse, 1988). However, a series of analyses indicated that when measures of reading vol145

ume were used as control variables, the positive relationships between age and vocabulary and age and declarative knowledge were eliminated (in contrast, the negative relationships between age and fluid abilities were largely unchanged). Thus, the results of this study are consistent with the conjecture thatin the domain of verbal abilitiesreading a lot can even help to compensate for the normally deleterious effects of aging! (See also, Smith, 1996.)

first grade predicted these cognitive outcomes in the eleventh grade. We interpreted the reading volume measures administered in the eleventh grade as cumulative indicators of variance in reading volume that had taken place many years earlier. Thus, we viewed the measures as in some sense retrospective indicators tapping the cumulative experiences and habits of the students some distance in time before actual assessment. As a result, we were able to examine how far this retrospective feature could be stretched. We addressed the question of whether the speed of initial reading acquisition in the first grade could predict later tendencies to engage in reading activities even after differences in general cognitive abilities were controlled, as some models of Matthew effects in educational achievement would predict (Chall, Jacobs, & Baldwin, 1990; Juel, 1994; Stanovich, 1986). We statistically removed the contribution of eleventh-grade reading comprehension ability, in order to remove the direct association between reading volume and current reading ability. Then we examined the contribution of three standardized measures of first grade reading ability (decoding, word recognition, and comprehension) and observed that all three measures predicted eleventh-grade reading volume even after eleventh-grade reading comprehension ability had been partialed out! In contrast, we observed that first grade intelligence measures do not uniquely predict eleventh-grade reading volume in the same way. Thus, this study showed us that an early start in reading is important in predicting a lifetime of literacy experienceand this is true regardless of the level of reading comprehension ability that the individual eventually attains. This is a stunning finding because it means that students who get off to a fast start in reading are more likely to read more over the years, and, furthermore, this very act of reading can help children compensate for modest
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How Do We Become Avid Readers?


Moving back again to the other end of the age spectrum, we switch focus to the question: Given that lifelong reading habits are such strong predictors of verbal cognitive growth, what is it that predicts these habits? Weve been looking at reading volume as a predictor of reading comprehension and cognitive ability, but what predicts reading volume or avid reading? It is generally agreed that comprehension ability and reading volume are in a reciprocal relationship. In an attempt to tease apart this reciprocal relationship, we explored the linkages between childrens first-grade reading and cognitive abilities and eleventh-grade outcomes in a unique ten-year longitudinal study (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1997). Most of our earlier studies involved assessing contemporaneous relations, but in this study, we examined the performance of a sample of students who had been tested as first graders (see Stanovich, Cunningham, and Feeman, 1984). About one half of these students were available ten years later for testing as eleventh graders. At this time, we administered a set of reading comprehension, cognitive ability, vocabulary, and general knowledge tasks, as well as several measures of reading volume. Additionally, some standardized test scores from the intervening period were available. We were therefore able to examine what variables in the
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levels of cognitive ability by building their vocabulary and general knowledge. In other words, ability is not the only variable that counts in the development of intellectual functioning. Those who read a lot will enhance their verbal intelligence; that is, reading will make them smarter.

comprehension skills will build vocabulary and cognitive structures through reading. We can thus elicit two crucial messages from our research findings. First, it is difficult to overstate the importance of getting children off to an early successful start in reading. We must ensure that students decoding and word recognition abilities are progressing solidly. Those who read well are likely to read more, thus setting an upward spiral into motion. Second, we should provide all children, regardless of their achievement levels, with as many reading experiences as possible. Indeed, this becomes doubly imperative for precisely those children whose verbal abilities are most in need of bolstering, for it is the very act of reading that can build those capacities. An encouraging message for teachers of low-achieving students is implicit here. We often despair of changing our students abilities, but there is at least one partially malleable habit that will itself develop abilitiesreading!

The Reciprocal Effects of Reading Volume


We can begin to sketch a view of the reciprocal influences of early reading acquisition and reading volume as determinants of later reading comprehension and other cognitive abilities. Early success at reading acquisition is one of the keys that unlocks a lifetime of reading habits. The subsequent exercise of this habit serves to further develop reading comprehension ability in an interlocking positive feedback logic (Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986; Juel, 1988; Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill, 1991; Stanovich, 1986, 1993). Although it is difficult to tease apart, we have attempted to trace the increasing divergence in childrens reading ability, as well as other cognitive outcomes, by examining both sides of the important role of reciprocal causation. Our longitudinal study has permitted us to observe these effects, whereby children who get out of the gate quicklywho crack the spelling-to-sound code early on appear to enter into a positive feedback loop. One of the benefits of these reciprocating effects may be a level of participation in literacy activities that leads to a lifetime habit of reading and thus sets the stage for future opportunitiesopportunities not enjoyed by children who enter into this feedback loop more slowly. A positive dimension of our research is that all of our studies have demonstrated that reading yields significant dividends for everyonenot just for the smart kids or the more able readers. Even the child with limited reading and
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References
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