ABSTRACT
Language may be written in a variety of ways. European languages and English in particular, are alphabetic; in principle, each letter corresponds to a speech sound or phoneme. Reading any script can be defined as getting meaning from print. Word identification in skilled reading is a bottom-up, data-driven process; this is different from the situation with speech, which is much influenced by top-down processing. Reading is normally a self-paced task, the letters are clearly presented, and the letters in written words can be processed in parallel, while phonemes in speech have to be dealt with sequentially. In reading there are different routes to the mental lexicon. One route involves a direct connection between an internally represented string of letters and a location in the mental lexicon. Alternatively, the reader may work out the sound of the word and then use the spoken word system to achieve lexical access.
