The cognitive faculities of reading are constantly analized with the purpose of better understanding what they are, and if they can be isolated. The process of orthographic identification, recognizing words, is what makes up skillful and effeicent reading. How words are most quickly identified is the aim many previous experiements as well as Van Orden's.
             The general hyphothesis is that phonological indentification is more present in reading then orthological identification. That is to say that words are matched to their lexical entries by sound in a top-down process, rather then by their spelling in a bottom-up process. Also the process of identification is based upon positive rather then negative recognition. When a person reads their mind responds quickly to everything that matches up as a word and stops to concentrate when it reads something that is not identifible as a word ( or at least a known word). This understanding is the reasoning behind the tests being based upon positive responses rather then negative ones.
             Van Orden took some of this understanding from an experiement done by Coltheart and Rubenstein, in which they did a test using pseudohomophones. This test consisted of constructed normal words that were not actually words but sounded the same as certain real words which were presented along with it. The entire test was based upon negative responses, in which the subjects only said 'no' if the word they saw was not a real word. This test revealed that the negative responses were slower then the 'normal' process of positive identification in reading.
             The first experiement was intended to isolate the orthological aspect of identification. The real goal of the testing was to see if the subject would accidentally confuse homophones as being part of the 'catagory word' or base word. The subject would be flashed 172 words, the first fifty of which would be practice trails, and be
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