1. Bottom-Up Processing: This view emphasizes the role of sensory input and decoding skills. It suggests that reading begins with recognizing individual letters and sounds (graphemes and phonemes), combining them into words, then phrases, and finally comprehending the meaning of the sentences and the text as a whole. This is a linear, sequential model, akin to building a structure from the ground up. Limitations include its inability to fully explain skilled reading, which involves anticipation and context-based inference.
2. Top-Down Processing: This perspective prioritizes the reader's prior knowledge, expectations, and context. It argues that readers use their existing knowledge to predict and anticipate what they will read, actively constructing meaning based on schemas and background information. The reader brings their world knowledge to bear on the text, influencing the interpretation of individual words and sentences. This model explains how readers can efficiently process text even with imperfect visual input or unfamiliar words, but it can underemphasize the role of basic decoding skills.
3. Interactive Processing: This view combines aspects of both bottom-up and top-down processing, acknowledging that reading is a dynamic and complex process where both decoding skills and prior knowledge interact continuously. Readers don't simply move from one stage to the next linearly; instead, they engage in a constant interplay between decoding information from the text and using their knowledge to interpret that information. This model recognizes that the reader's reading strategies adapt to the demands of the text, with more reliance on bottom-up processes for unfamiliar texts and more reliance on top-down processes for familiar ones. This interactive model is generally considered the most comprehensive and accurate representation of the reading process.