Reading

Abstract

Communication via written words is one of humanity's greatest inventions and plays a critical role in modern society. This chapter outlines the key cognitive, neural, and computational aspects of the reading system. In so doing, it shows how reading takes advantage of domain‐general processing abilities and bootstraps written communication from other neurocomputational systems, including vision and spoken language processing. It also explains how failure in different parts of the reading system can lead to reading disorders such as dyslexia. Furthermore, emerging trends reveal exciting new directions for reading research, including advancing the understanding of how the brain changes as a function of learning to read, how the brain adapts to process different languages, and how to formalize our understanding of reading in more biologically plausible models. This chapter thus outlines how an interdisciplinary perspective to understanding reading has and will continue to advance our understanding of reading in ways that are critical for both fundamental and applied aims.

How are visual words represented? Insights from EEG‐based visual word decoding, feature derivation and image reconstruction

“…Specifically, sensitivity to letter identity is found for every letter position across a relatively large and well‐controlled pool of words (e.g., having the same length and CVC structure). Of note, orthographic similarity accounts for the structure of the data beyond pure visual similarity, suggesting sensitivity to visual forms more abstract than the pictorial content of a given stimulus (Carreiras, Armstrong, & Dunabeitia, ). Additional correlations between decoding accuracy, on one hand, and word frequency and the number of orthographic neighbors, on the other, also confirm the impact of linguistic processing on our results.…”