Capitalizing on the promise of item-level analyses to inform new understandings of word reading development.

This special issue was expressly designed to illustrate how item-level analytic models can be employed to answer new questions in the field of reading. To accomplish this, we present a compilation of six empirical studies that explore how item-level analyses can be used to advance the field's understanding of word reading development. In this introduction to the special issue, I summarize the unique advantages of item-level analyses and discuss how the papers in this special issue are valuable examples of how item-focused analyses can be used in a variety of ways to address important questions across orthographies, word characteristics, and tasks.