Orthographic processing: A ‘mid-level’ vision of reading: The 44th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture

Abstract

I will describe how orthographic processing acts as a central interface between visual and linguistic processing during reading, and as such can be considered to be the 'mid-level vision' of reading research. In order to make this case, I first summarize the evidence in favour of letter-based word recognition before examining work investigating how orthographic similarities among words influence single word reading. I describe how evidence gradually accumulated against traditional measures of orthographic similarity and the associated theories of orthographic processing, forcing a reconsideration of how letter-position information is represented by skilled readers. Then, I present the theoretical framework that was developed to explain these findings, with a focus on the distinction between location-specific and location-invariant orthographic representations. Finally, I describe work extending this theoretical framework in two main directions: first, to the realm of reading development, with the aim to specify the key changes in the processing of letters and letter strings that accompany successful learning to read, and second, to the realm of sentence reading, in order to specify how orthographic information can be processed across several words in parallel, and how skilled readers keep track of which letters belong to which words.

A compositional letter code in high-level visual cortex explains how we read jumbled words

“…were transposed compared to when the edge letters were transposedas did the 363 model predictions ( Figure 4F). These effects replicate the classic orthographic 364 processing effects reported across many studies Norris, 2013;365 Ziegler et al, 2013;Grainger, 2018). 366…”

“…It can be 134 seen that, finding TA among AT is harder than finding UT among AT. Thus, letter 135 transpositions are more similar compared to letter substitutions, consistent with the 136 classic results on reading (Norris, 2013;Grainger, 2018). To characterize the effect of 137 bigram frequency, we included both frequent bigrams (e.g.…”

“…This question has captured the popular imagination through demonstrations 17 such as the Cambridge University effect (Rawlinson, 1976;Grainger and Whitney, 18 2004), depicted in Figure 1A. Reading a word or a jumbled word can be influenced by 19 a variety of factors (Norris, 2013;Grainger, 2018). Word reading is easy when similar 20 shapes are substituted Perea and Panadero, 2014), when the first 21 and last letters are preserved (Rayner et al, 2006), when there are fewer 22…”

“…transpositions (Gomez et al, 2008) and when word shape is preserved (Norris, 2013;23 Grainger, 2018). Word reading is also easier for words with frequent bigrams or 24 trigrams, for frequent words and for shuffled words that preserve intermediate units 25 such as consonant clusters or morphemes (Norris, 2013;Grainger, 2018). Despite 26 these insights, it is not clear how these factors combine, what their distinct 27 contributions are, and more generally, how word representations relate to letter 28…”

“…In Experiment 5, we used a widely used paradigm for word recognition, a lexical 304 decision task (Norris, 2013;Grainger, 2018). Subjects had to indicate whether a string 305 of letters is a word or not using a keypress.…”