Learning to read aligns visual analytical skills with grapheme-phoneme mapping: evidence from illiterates

Abstract

Learning to read puts evolutionary established speech and visual object recognition functions to novel use. As we previously showed, this leads to particular rearrangements and differentiations in these functions, for instance the habitual preference for holistic perceptual organization in visual object recognition and its suppression in perceiving letters. We performed the experiment in which the differentiation between holistic non-letter processing and analytic letter processing in literates was originally shown (van Leeuwen and Lachmann, 2004) with illiterate adults. The original differentiation is absent in illiterates; they uniformly showed analytic perception for both letters and non-letters. The result implies that analytic visual perception is not a secondary development resulting from learning to read but, rather, a primary mode of perceptual organization on a par with holistic perception.

How Literacy Acquisition Affects the Illiterate Mind – A Critical Examination of Theories and Evidence

“…Thus, as in the case of memory research, literacy may improve face perception rather than being detrimental. Note also that the Lachmann et al (2012) findings do not mean that readers have lost the ability to process letters holistically. van Leeuwen and Lachmann (2004) have shown that contrasting strategies of holistic processing in shapes and analytic processing for letters resulted in uniformly holistic processing if task demands required it.…”

Distinguishing cause from effect – many deficits associated with developmental dyslexia may be a consequence of reduced and suboptimal reading experience

“…Lachmann, Khera, Srinivasan, & van Leeuwen, 2012;Lachmann & van Leeuwen, 2008). Note that the visual routines supporting object recognition that humans have acquired during evolution can actually impede reading acquisition.…”

In Defense of Position Uncertainty

“…Consequently, the different features of the characters cannot rapidly be bound into a single object (see Lachmann, Khera, Srinivasan, & van Leeuwen, 2012). Consequently, the different features of the characters cannot rapidly be bound into a single object (see Lachmann, Khera, Srinivasan, & van Leeuwen, 2012).…”