ABSTRACT
Understanding how literate adults can read single words has been one of the major objectives of cognitive psychology since the very inception of this science (Huey, 1908). The process of silent word reading (reading for meaning) minimally requires two types of codes: orthography (knowledge about letter identities and letter position) and semantics (knowledge about the meanings of words). The process of reading aloud minimally requires an orthographic code and a phonological/articulatory code in order to generate a pronunciation. Although no more than two critical codes are necessarily required for each task, it has become increasingly clear that all three codes (orthography, phonology, and semantics) are involved in both silent reading and reading aloud. The empirical evidence to be reviewed in the present chapter suggests that these different codes interact in the on-going reading process and conjointly influence observable performance. This has led to the development of a generic architecture for word recognition (see Figure 7.1) that emphasizes the critical role of such cross-code interactions. It is the precise nature of the interactions between orthographic, phonological, and semantic codes during the perception of printed words that forms the focus of the present chapter.
