Citation:
Abstract:
The processing of letter order has profound implications for understanding how visually presented words are processed and how they are recognized, given the lexical architecture that characterizes a given language. Research conducted in different writing systems suggests that letter-position effects, such as transposed-letter priming, are not universal. The cognitive system may perform very different types of processing on a sequence of letters depending on factors that are unrelated to peripheral orthographic characteristics but related to the deep structural properties of the printed stimuli. Assuming that identical neurobiological constraints govern reading performance in any language, these findings suggest that neurobiological constraints interact with the idiosyncratic statistical properties of a given writing system to determine the preciseness or fuzziness of letter-position coding. This chapter reviews the evidence for this interaction and discusses the implications for theories of reading and for modeling visual word recognition.