Methods and devices for reading data from non-volatile memory cells

Disclosed is a method for responding to a single user read command of a complementary cell array including one or more complementary cell pairs, the method including: determining if a first group of cells out of a data word is in an erased state or in a programmed state, and outputting a data word so that (a) if the first group of cells is determined to be erased a logical "one" is output for each bit of the data word and (b) if the first group of cells is determined to be programmed the result of a complementary read is output for each bit of the data word.