ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how skilled adult literacy relates to other cognitive domains such as visual recognition and spoken language; how a complex skill such as reading can be broken down into a collection of more basic mechanisms; and how the skills of reading and spelling may relate to each other. The dual-route model predicts that selective brain damage to different components comprising the two routes should have different consequences for the reading of different types of written material. Developmental dyslexia is defined as problems in literacy that cannot be attributed to lack of opportunity or other known causes. The evidence from functional imaging suggests that different brain regions are involved in reading via grapheme–phoneme conversion and reading. Functional imaging suggests that reading uses similar brain regions across different languages, albeit to varying degrees. Learning to read and write may involve the construction of a dedicated neural and cognitive architecture in the brain.
