Two experiments were conducted to determine the features of text to which skilled adult readers need to attend while reading and the features that either are of minimal importance or can be processed automatically without directed processing. In the first experiment, 12 college students attended to a timed picture naming task, in which a picture was presented to a subject for naming at the same time that a word was presented to the picture's right. The pictures were shown in each of five experimental conditions: (1) with no word, (2) with a series of letters that could not be construed as an English word, (3) with letters that were an approximation of an English word, (4) with a word that was not an associate, and (5) with a semantic associate word. In the second experiment, 14 college students were asked to determine whether a series of letters was in fact an English word. Accompanying each series of letters was an unattended stimulus word. The two experiments showed that for skilled readers the meanings of words are recognized automatically, and that the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules also operate automatically. (FL)