Orthographic Processing and Reading

Abstract

I will argue that processing letter identities and letter positions occupies a central interface between visual and linguistic processing during reading. This is primarily due to the fact that reading words in languages that use an alphabetic script is essentially letter-based. Information about letter identities and letter positions provides the gateway to whole-word written representations, to morphemes such as prefixes and suffixes, and to sound based representations. I will first summarize work on letter identification processes before describing mechanisms for parallel letter processing during single word reading. Finally, I will describe recent work demonstrating parallel processing of written information spanning several words during sentence reading.