This paper presents an overview of evidence from psychological research, which enables us to understand the processes involved in word reading, how children develop word reading skills and how to teach them to read words successfully. Psychological models of reading in alphabetic orthographies propose two routes to word reading: an indirect route…

This study aimed to investigate the timecourse and neural underpinnings of the coding of radical positions in Chinese character reading. To isolate effects of radical positions, four types of pseudocharacters were created in which the constituent radicals appeared in positions varying in probability of occurrence, that is, Unique, Dominant,…

The visual complexity of orthographies varies across writing systems. Prior research has shown that complexity strongly influences the initial stage of reading development: the perceptual learning of grapheme forms. This study presents a computational simulation that examines the degree to which visual complexity leads to grapheme learning…

We employed brain-behavior analyses to explore the relationship between performance on tasks measuring phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, and rapid auditory processing (all predictors of reading (dis)ability) and brain organization for print and speech in beginning readers. For print-related activation, we observed a shared set of…

Through computational modeling, here we examine whether visual and task characteristics of writing systems alone can account for lateralization differences in visual word recognition between different languages without assuming influence from left hemisphere (LH) lateralized language processes. We apply a hemispheric processing model of face…

Brain-electric correlates of reading have traditionally been studied with word-by-word presentation, a condition that eliminates important aspects of the normal reading process and precludes direct comparisons between neural activity and oculomotor behavior. In the present study, we investigated effects of word predictability on eye movements (EM)…

Are words read visually (by means of a direct mapping from orthography to semantics) or phonologically (by mapping from orthography to phonology to semantics)? The authors addressed this long-standing debate by examining how a large-scale computational model based on connectionist principles would solve the problem and comparing the model's…

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century models of first and second language reading are examined and compared. Figures are provided of six models that propose relationships among visual input and processes, auditory input, phonological processes, and comprehension. These models illustrate the processes that may be operating in persons who achieve their…

Senior scientists representing a variety of research-oriented disciplines examine the reading process. Among the topics discussed are visual perception, the processing of written information, models for reading and speech, the relationship of spelling to sound, and areas of needed research. Also discussed are the influences of grammatical…

Examines and rejects two traditional assumptions about fluent reading: that identification of letters is necessary to identify words; and that identification of words is necessary to comprehend. Proposes that identification and comprehension are two separate tasks and that a reader comprehends because he reads for meaning in the first place. (MB)

A discussion of the visual aspect of second-language reading processes proposes a theoretical model of reading and reports on research into the kinds of questions second-language students ask in class. The model of reading outlined is based on the operations of the human eye. Just as the operations of the lens (focus) change the picture at the…

Behaviorism cannot adequately explain language processing. A synthesis of the psycholinguistic and information processing approaches of cognitive psychology, however, can provide the basis for a speculative analysis of reading, if this synthesis is tempered by a perceptual learning theory of uncertainty reduction. Theorists of information…

Presents a language processing model that distinguishes four functional components of reading and listening: feature detection, primary recognition, secondary recognition, and rehearsal and recoding. Uses the model to describe and incorporate some recent research. (GT)

We report a series of neural network models of semantic processing of single English words in the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. We implement the foveal splitting of the visual field and assess the influence of this splitting on a mapping from orthography to semantic representations in single word reading. The models were trained on…

Presents six diagrams that describe what happens when a text is read. (HOD)