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]; nfemale = 264, nmale = 180) were average to struggling middle-school students from an urban area in Eastern Iowa that were all native speakers of English and were roughly equally from grades 6, 7, and 8 (average age: 13 years). Two-hundred-fifty-five students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for economic disadvantage. Participants completed different masked and unmasked task versions where they read a word and selected a response (e.g., a pictured referent). This was related to standardized measures of decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension. Decoding was uniquely predicted by knowledge (unmasked performance), whereas fluency was uniquely predicted by automaticity (masked performance). Automaticity was stable across two testing points. Thus, automaticity should be considered an individually reliable marker/reading trait that uniquely predicts some skills in average to struggling middle-school students. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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自动化是预测中学阅读结果的独立特征。

许多中学生都在苦苦挣扎于基本的阅读技巧。造成这种情况的原因之一可能是单词级词汇处理过程缺乏自动化。为了对此进行研究，我们使用了一种新颖的向后掩蔽范例，其中一个书面单词是否被掩蔽覆盖了。参加者（N = 444 [排除后]； nfemale = 264，nMale = 180）是来自爱荷华州东部市区挣扎的初中学生的平均水平，他们都是讲英语的母语，并且平均从6、7年级开始8岁（平均年龄：13岁）。255名学生有资格获得免费或减价的午餐，这是经济上的劣势的代表。参与者完成了不同的掩盖和未掩盖的任务版本，他们在其中读取单词并选择了响应（例如，带有图片的参考对象）。这与解码的标准化措施有关，流利度和阅读理解力。解码是通过知识唯一地预测的（无遮盖的性能），而流畅性是通过自动性唯一的预测（遮盖的性能）。在两个测试点上，自动化程度是稳定的。因此，自动化应该被认为是个人可靠的标记/阅读特质，它可以为处于困境中的中学生平均预测一些技能。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2021 APA，保留所有权利）。