ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the basic processes involved in reading words and recognising spoken words. In reading, each word can be seen as a whole, whereas spoken words are spread out in time and are transitory. It is important to study reading because adults lacking effective reading skills are very disadvantated. Studies of masked phonological priming suggest that visual word recognition typically depends on prior phonological processing. According to the interactive activation model, bottom-up and top-down processes interact during word recognition. Completion of frequency checking of a word is the signal to initiate an eye-movement programme, and completion of lexical access is the signal to shift attention covertly to the next word. The chapter shows two major theoretical approaches focusing on reading aloud in healthy and brain-damaged individuals. First, there is the dual-route cascaded model and second, there is the distributed connectionist approach or triangle model. Patients varying in brain damage exhibit different patterns of impairment in speech perception.
