Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 55

Jonathan Grainger

Reading is both a visual and a linguistic skill, and orthographic processing occupies the key interface between vision and language (Grainger, 2018). From this perspective, single‐word reading is a combination of visual object identification processes and linguistic processing, with orthographic processing connecting the two. My aim in this chapter is to review the visual and orthographic processes involved in identifying letters, dealing with letter strings and identifying individual words. Recognizing that words are rarely processed in isolation, I end the chapter by describing more recent work that considers orthographic processing in the context of multiple words and in doing so, attempts to bridge the gap between research on single‐word reading and research on sentence reading. Throughout, my focus is on the processes involved in skilled reading in languages that use an alphabetic script.

Written words present a special class of stimuli, distinct from visual objects more generally. Orthographic processing allows generic visual processing mechanisms to make contact with the linguistic processes that are specific to word stimuli. As shown in Figure 3.1, the contact is established via orthographic processing across three types of mapping: 1) orthography‐to‐semantics via whole‐word orthographic representations (orthographic words); 2) orthography to morpho‐semantics via morpho‐orthographic representations; and 3) orthography‐to‐phonology via sublexical spelling‐sound correspondences.

Figure 3.1 Orthographic processing as the central interface of the reading process, enabling mappings between vision and language for words, morphemes, and sublexical spelling‐sound correspondences.

The present chapter is concerned uniquely with the leftmost pathway in Figure 3.1. Bysbaert, this volume deals with phonology (the rightmost pathway), and Rastle (this volume) deals with morphology (the center pathway). Also note that the work to be covered here involves silent reading for meaning¹ and largely ignores the extensive theoretical (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001; Perry et al., 2007; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) and empirical work on reading aloud. That said, within the framework of dual‐route theories of reading (Coltheart et al., 2001; Perry et al., 2007), adding a connection between orthographic words (also termed whole‐word orthographic representations) and phonological word forms in Figure 3.1 provides the necessary architecture for reading aloud and for phonological influences on silent reading (cf. the bimodal interactive‐activation model: Diependaele et al., 2010; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). The processing of letters and words along the leftmost pathway in Figure 3.1 is thought to be performed by neural structures located in the left fusiform gyrus, dubbed the Visual Word Form Area (Yeatman, this volume), with these structures connecting to brain areas dedicated to the processing of phonology as well as higher‐level syntactic and semantic processing.

So, what is orthographic processing? I argue that orthographic processing is best defined as the processing of letter identities and letter positions. This definition of orthographic processing, and the hypothesized fundamental role it plays during reading, is based on the premise that written words are primarily recognized via their component letters.