Sight Recognition is knowing a word by sight rather than needing to break the word apart. When readers immediately know written words and what they mean, they understand more. Readers who have to work to figure out many words in a text can lose track of the overall meaning.

Sight Recognition improves reading fluency and efficiency. In this process, as soon as the word is seen, the meaning and pronunciation of the word are automatically activated.

Many sight words are words that do not conform to rules of phonetic decoding (e.g. light, could, was, said) and must be recognized by sight because they cannot be sounded out phonetically.

Read the full annotated bibliography of our Sight Recognition research.