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In this chapter, I have reviewed extensive evidence that phonology plays a central role in skilled reading. This is even the case in groups with suboptimal access to phonological forms within spoken language (such as people born deaf and students learning a second language in school), and notably, deficits in phonological processing are associated with reading problems (dyslexia).

Alphabetic languages use letters to represent the sounds of spoken words and this introduces two ways for deriving phonology. First, letters can be recoded into sounds, a process seen when readers name new or meaningless letter strings, such as teel. This has been called assembled phonology. Second, addressed phonology captures the observation that a visual word can be recognized as a familiar visual stimulus associated with a particular spoken name. This allows words such as awry or yacht to be named correctly, even though these words violate the most frequent letter‐sound correspondences. This type of addressed phonology also works in non‐alphabetic languages such as Chinese.

Figure 4.6 Brain regions involved in language processing, illustrating the dorsal pathway, connecting the phonology‐related brain areas, and the ventral pathway, connecting the meaning‐related brain areas. The pathways are bidirectional, combining bottom‐up and top‐down information streams.aFG = anterior fusiform gyrus, AG = angular gyrus, aSTG = anterior superior temporal gyrus, IFG = inferior frontal gyrus (also called Broca’s area), MFG = middle frontal gyrus, mSTG = middle superior temporal gyrus (includes the primary auditory cortex), PCA = precentral area, pFG = posterior fusiform gyrus, pSTG = posterior superior temporal gyrus (also called Wernicke’s area), SMG = supramarginal gyrus, SPL = superior parietal lobule.

For some time, researchers defended extreme positions about the contribution of phonology to visual word recognition: Either it was not involved at all, or phonological recoding was an essential step in visual word recognition. At present, it is widely accepted that orthographic and phonological information jointly contribute to visual word recognition and that this is achieved through rapid interactions between different forms of coding information in the brain. I discussed three computational models of how this can be realised (the DRC model, the CDP+ model, and the Triangle model). The hypothesis of two pathways in written word recognition with multiple interactions between orthographic, phonological and semantic codes also provides fruitful insights for the understanding of brain activity in visual word recognition (Figures 4.5 and 4.6).

In summary, it is clear from the evidence reviewed in this chapter, that visual language processing cannot be understood properly without taking phonology into account.