Klein, RaymondSaint-Aubin, Jean2016-12-082016-12-082016Published version: Klein, R. M., & Saint-Aubin, J. (2016). What a simple letter detection task can tell us about cognitive processes in reading. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 25:6, 417-424. doi:10.1177/0963721416661173http://hdl.handle.net/10222/72308http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963721416661173Understanding reading is a central issue for psychology, with major societal implications. Over the past five decades, a simple letter-detection task has been used as a window on the psycholinguistic processes involved in reading. When readers are asked to read a text for comprehension while marking with a pencil all instances of a target letter, they miss some of the letters in a systematic way known as the missing-letter effect. In the current article, we review evidence from studies that have emphasized neuroimaging, eye movement, rapid serial visual presentation, and auditory passages. As we review, the missing-letter effect captures a wide variety of cognitive processes, including lexical activation, attention, and extraction of phrase structure. To account for the large set of findings generated by studies of the missing-letter effect, we advanced an attentional-disengagement model that is rooted in how attention is allocated to and disengaged from lexical items during reading, which we have recently shown applies equally to listening.enreadingletter processingmissing-letter effectattentioneye-movementArticle