This material appeared previously in Smith (1998). Although the diagram is reasonably well captioned, it is best read as a subordinate file to our e-paper on "Dyslexia and the Psycholinguistics of Reading"

Rayner and Pollatsek's (1989) Model of Reading: This is Rayner and Pollatsek's (1989) attempt to improve upon earlier models by giving greater emphasis to eye movement control processes. Externally observable elements are shown as circles, processes as squared-off boxes, and memory structures as rounded-off boxes. Both Working Memory (WM) and Long Term Memory (LTM) are divided into three subordinate modules (the possibility of others is recognised, but they are not deemed relevant to reading). The LTM Lexicon is constantly checking for known words in the stream of the information being fed to it from the Initial Encoding Processes. Eye fixation is controlled by both Foveal and Parafoveal cues, culminating in Attention Shifts as and when appropriate. If two or more words were originally present in the perceptual span, then the attentional shift is merely to Next Word (and thereby back to Lexicon), otherwise it is necessary to perform a new Saccade and refresh the entire perceptual span. Lexical access along Route 1 - the "direct route" - is based upon visual form, whilst access along Route 2-3 - the "indirect route" - assumes the sort of grapheme-phoneme conversion described in detail in the text. Each successfully identified word is added to a running sentence-level Text Representation being built in WM [but shown by the authors in LTM]. This is constantly analysed for syntactic function by the Parser, and its conclusions passed to a Thematic Processor which builds up a higher-order picture of what the communication is all about. It is helped in this by the body of LTM Real World Knowledge. If either the Parser or the Thematic Processor starts to fall behind, they can slow Eye Fixation down momentarily while they catch up. Similarly, if they get lost or detect a textual "anomaly" of some sort they can request a regression. Both direct and indirect routes can activate a phonologically encoded form of short term memory known as Inner Speech. 

Redrawn from a black-and-white original in Rayner and Pollatsek (1989, p473; Figure 13.5). This graphic Copyright © 2003, Derek J. Smith.