Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 59

Beyond letter identity, information about the positions of letters within a word is crucial for accurate word recognition. Grainger and van Heuven (2004) proposed a model of orthographic processing that provides an account of how location‐specific visual information is used to generate a location‐invariant code for letter‐in‐word order (see Dehaene et al., 2005, for a similar proposal). In this account, the first level of orthographic processing involves the location‐specific encoding of letter identities via a horizontally aligned bank of letter detectors (for written languages with horizontally aligned scripts; see Figure 3.4). These function in the same way as the isolated letter detectors previously described and are thought to be case‐specific (e.g., separate detectors for lowercase a and uppercase A). Such location‐specific and case‐specific letter detectors provide information about where different letter identities are located along a line of text relative to where readers’ eyes are looking. These location‐specific letters are analogous to the location‐specific complex features involved in visual object identification. Therefore, one of the major transitions that has to be achieved during reading acquisition is the change from letters as individual objects to letters as object parts. In other words, during the very first stages of learning to read, after learning the alphabet, letters take on the role of the complex features that subtend visual object identification.