ABSTRACT
Reading is prototypical neither of ordinary visual perception nor of ordinary language understanding, its two major evolutionary and ontogenetic forebears. Instead it is a hybrid activity. Although it depends on seeing and its goal is to comprehend linguistic messages, it requires capabilities, skills, and knowledge characteristic of neither basic function when accessed alone. More particularly, reading involves a special kind of seeing because the stimulus for perception is a written linguistic message. Furthermore, it requires, at the very least, a special mode of access to procedures for language understanging because written linguistic messages are visible rather than audible. To a large degree, developing these new modes of seeing and understanding language is the problem of reading acquisition. Here we consider both of these special skills in more detail as a way of characterizing the nature of reading itself and the problem of reading acquisition in particular.
