The visual system is tuned by its inputs. The behavior of reading offers a unique way to examine tuning for visual representations (letters) because readers have massive experience recognizing letters in a systematic context (reading). One aspect of reading is that letters are highly crowded within words, which severely limits their…

While children are able to name letters fairly quickly, the automatisation of letter-speech sound mappings continues over the first years of reading development. In the current longitudinal fMRI study, we explored developmental changes in cortical responses to letters and speech sounds across 3 yearly measurements in a sample of 18 8-11 year old…

Communications through electronic devices require knowledge in typewriting, typically with the pinyin input method in China. Yet, the over utilization of the pronunciation-based pinyin input method may violate the traditional learning processes of written Chinese, which involves abundant visual orthographic analysis of characters and repeated…

Phonological interference during written-word meaning judgments occurs in both Chinese and English, suggesting that word-level phonological activation is universal rather than dependent on the sublexical structures that vary with writing systems. To accommodate this universality, we distinguish two sources of phonological congruence between a…

Letter production through handwriting creates visual experiences that may be important for the development of visual letter perception. We sought to better understand the neural responses to different visual percepts created during handwriting at different levels of experience. Three groups of participants, younger children, older children, and…

It is under debate whether the neural representation of numbers and letters might rely on distinct neural correlates, or on a mostly shared neural network. In the present study, a total of 47 children in fifth grade (Experiment 1) and sixth grade (Experiment 2) simply copied numbers and letters on a touch screen while brain activation changes were…

A functional region of left fusiform gyrus termed "the visual word form area" (VWFA) develops during reading acquisition to respond more strongly to printed words than to other visual stimuli. Here, we examined responses to letters among 5- and 6-year-old early kindergarten children (N = 48) with little or no school-based reading…

The emergence of visual cortex specialization for culturally acquired characters like letters and digits, both arbitrary shapes related to specific cognitive domains, is yet unclear. Here, 20 young children (6.12 years old) were tested with a frequency-tagging paradigm coupled with electroencephalogram recordings to assess discrimination responses…

The aim of this study was to gain additional knowledge about the asynchrony phenomenon in developmental dyslexia, especially when spatial selective attention is manipulated. Adults with developmental dyslexia and non-impaired readers underwent two experimental tasks, one including alphabetic stimuli (pre-lexical consonant-vowel syllables) and the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of phonological information on visual word recognition by using letter transposition effects. The Korean writing system gives a unique opportunity to investigate such phenomenon since the transposition of the beginning consonant (onset) and the end consonant (coda) of a certain syllable allows one…

This study explores the time-course of word processing by grammatical class (verbs vs. nouns) and meaning (action vs. non-action) by means of an ERP experiment. The morphology of Spanish words allows for a noun (e.g., "bail"-e [a dance]) or a verb (e.g., "bail"-ar [to dance]) to be formed by simply changing the suffix attached…

While hemispheric differences in global/local processing have been reported by various studies, it is still under dispute at which processing stage they occur. Primarily, it was assumed that these asymmetries originate from an early perceptual stage. Instead, the content-level binding theory (Hubner & Volberg, 2005) suggests that the hemispheres…

The "automatic letter-sound integration hypothesis" (Blomert, [Blomert, L., 2011]) proposes that dyslexia results from a failure to fully integrate letters and speech sounds into automated audio-visual objects. We tested this hypothesis in a sample of English-speaking children with dyslexic difficulties (N = 13) and samples of…

The encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created…

The current study investigated whether Russian--English bilinguals activate knowledge of Russian when reading English sentences. Russian and English share only a few letters, but there are some interlingual homographs (e.g., POT, which means "mouth" in Russian). Critical sentences were written such that the Russian meaning of the…