Word search puzzles have, like crosswords and arrowords, been very popular in the United Kingdom, and - also in common with these latter puzzles - have had complete magazines devoted to them. Word searches are commonly found in daily newspapers and puzzle books. Some teachers use them as educational tools for children, the benefit being that young minds can learn new words and their spellings by intensively searching for them, letter by letter, in the puzzle. A common strategy for finding all the words is to go through the puzzle left to right (or vice versa) and look for the first letter
Missing letter effect circle a target letter every time they come across it while reading a short passage. The missing letter effect is more likely to appear when reading words that are part of a normal sequence, than when words are embedded in a mixed-up sequence (e.g. readers asked to read backwards). Two primary hypotheses tried to explain the missing letter effect: Healy (1994) emphasized identification processes playing a crucial role, almost entirely focusing on word frequency. However, Koriat & Greenberg (1994) viewed the structural role of the word within a sentence (i.e. function words vs. content words) to be crucial. Both accounts