Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 66

This chapter opened with the argument that orthographic representations play a key role within the complex interplay of information processing that allows skilled readers to extract meaning from print. This argument hinges on two hypotheses. One is that words are the basic units of the reading process. The other is that letters are the basic units of words, and that orthographic processing is all about the processing of letter identities and letter‐order information. The review proceeded to consider the evidence in favor of letter‐based word recognition, and the evidence in favor of feature‐based letter identification as the starting point of the whole process as well as factors that are thought to determine variations in letter visibility when readers process multiletter arrays (acuity, crowding, and spatial attention). A description of some of the visual factors thought to determine ease of word identification, and most notably the position in a word where readers first fixate that word led to a consideration of how letter‐order information is encoded independently of where readers are looking at a word. Any viable mechanism for letter‐order encoding has to be able to accommodate a high degree of flexibility in this process, as evidenced by transposed‐letter effects, for example. The same type of flexibility was echoed in the section examining word‐in‐sentence processing, given the evidence for transposed‐word effects. Indeed, many of the phenomena observed at the letter‐word interface are paralleled at the word‐sentence interface, including parallel processing of letters in multiletter arrays and parallel processing of words in the multiword flankers task. This points to a common set of general‐purpose information‐processing principles that govern the overall process of reading. Exactly how such information‐processing principles adapt to the very special context of reading when children learn to read, and exactly how they are implemented in the literate brain, remain important questions for future research.