ABSTRACT
Skilled readers develop a singular form of visual expertise that allows them to process print with remarkable efficiency. Within a fraction of a second, they can extract the critical information needed to identify a word of more than 15 to 20 characters (Erdmann & Dodge, 1898). Although it was long assumed that this skill relied on sophisticated guessing strategies, most researchers in the word-recognition field acknowledge today that this capacity is perceptual in nature (see reviews by Carr, 1986). Top-down feedback from lexical to perceptual stages (e.g., Jacobs & Grainger, 1992; McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) and functional/structural reorganization of the visual system have been proposed as potential explanations (Cohen & Dehaene, 2004; McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003; see also Caramazza & Hillis, 1990; Cohen, Dehaene, Naccache, Lehéricy, Dehaene-Lambertz, Hénaff, & Michel, 2000; Warrington & Shallice, 1980). However, as the perceptual side of reading has generally been considered to belong to the field of vision research-as opposed to the domain of language (e.g., Frost, 1998)—little effort was made until recently to elaborate on these perceptual processes. Yet, as we will demonstrate, despite their nonlinguistic nature, these processes are essential to skilled reading.
