Psycholinguistics has offered many new insights into the development of reading, e.g., only a small part of the information necessary for reading comprehension comes from the printed page, comprehension must precede the identification of individual words, and reading is not decoding to spoken language. These views are elaborated in this collection of articles by such authors as George A. Miller in "Some Preliminaries to Psycholinguistics"; Kenneth S. Goodman in "Psycholinguistic Universals in the Reading Process,""Analysis of Oral Reading Miscues: Applied Psycholinguistics," and "On the Psycholinguistic Method of Teaching Reading"; Paul A. Kolers in "Three Stages of Reading"; Deborah Holmes in "The Independence of Letter, Word, and Meaning Identification in Reading"; Carol Chomsky in "Reading, Writing, and Phonology"; Jane Torrey in "Illiteracy in the Ghetto," and "Learning to Read without a Teacher: A Case Study"; and Paul Rozin, Susan Poritsky, and Raina Sotsky in "American Children with Reading Problems Can Easily Learn to Read English Represented by Chinese Characters." In the remaining chapters Smith discusses the learner and his language, alphabetic writing, the efficiency of phonics, the fallacies of decoding, and twelve easy ways to make learning to read difficult. (HS)