reducing them to the status of a systematic measurement error. Unfortunately, details of a mechanism that would produce this outcome in practice are lacking. It has also not gone un-noticed that the argument involves a considerable shift of ground, with cross-talk now being seen as characteristic of normal, rather than laboratory, reading. Furthermore, recent evidence that cross-talk varies as a function of the class and syntactic function of the words involved makes an explanation in terms of mislocation implausible. A critical question in the debate between proponents of serial and parallel views of reading is how the reader arrives relatively effortlessly at a single coherent understanding of the meaning of text. From the serial perspective reading is a sort of "surrogate listening", in which an orderly pattern of inspection delivers the message in the correct order: the problem is the pattern of inspection is usually anything but orderly. From the parallel perspective the meaning of several words becomes available simultaneously: the problem is how are these competing signals resolved into a single correct meaning? Serial Order in reading Together with colleagues (in particular Joël Pynte in Paris) Kennedy has recently addressed the problem of serial order in reading head on. Proponents of the view that reading is a kind of "surrogate listening" assume that the reader deals with each word in a strict serial order. You either process a word while looking directly at it, or, in certain cases, manage to attend to the next word without ever looking at it directly (in which case the word concerned may be skipped). In both circumstances words are processed, either overtly or covertly, in their correct serial order. Furthermore, this is a necessary order: the phrases "run home" and "home run" mean quite different things and the only way the two meanings can be disambiguated is to ensure they are looked at in the right order. Notwithstanding the superficial appeal of this position, Kennedy points out that the claim conflicts with the way people actually look at printed text. Real patterns of inspection are relatively chaotic. For example, words are often looked at several times (particularly so for the beginner); the eyes sometimes jump back several words and re-examine segments of text already processed; the reader may return to words that had been skipped; and so on. In fact it has been known for more than twenty years that a strictly serial