Visual Word Recognition
Neurobiology of LanguagePublished 4 September 2015
Kathleen Rastle
Citations41
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.18
SNIP0.98
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TL;DR
The cognitive processes that skilled readers use in order to recognize and pronounce individual words are discussed, with an emphasis on how the recognition of an isolated word is modulated by its lexicaland semantic-level properties and by its context.
Abstract
Reading is a cultural invention and a learned skill that is acquired only through years of instruction and practice. Understanding the functional mechanisms that underpin this astonishing form of expertise is a central aim of modern psycholinguistics and has been a question of interest since the beginnings of psychology as a scientific discipline. This chapter looks at one aspect of this process in particular—how we identify a printed letter string as a unique word and compute its meaning (i.e., visual word recognition)—by drawing on what we have learned about this process from the analysis of behavior.
Keywords
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