Research involving eye movement monitoring can help in understanding the nature of the mental processes involved in reading, how these develop as one learns to read, and what processing strategies or characteristics are more common in those children who fail to show normal progress in learning to read. First, eye movement records show that the eyes pause longer on some words than on others, move various distances and directions between pauses, and exhibit patterns of movements indicating what is being attended to at different moments, what kinds of processing are taking place, and when processing difficulties arise. Second, eye movement data are useful in analyzing simultaneously collected data, such as brain wave records or oral reading protocols. Finally, eye movement data can be used for controlling experimental manipulations during ongoing reading. The ability to control the nature of the stimulus pattern that is present on any given fixation during reading provides a powerful technique for studying the perceptual processes that are taking place. Research techniques involving the monitoring of eye movements provide powerful new ways of studying the characteristics of the reading process, even when eye movements themselves are not involved in the etiology of the reading disorder. (HOD)