Learning the visual word code

Visual words are peculiar cognitive entities living under several and apparently conflicting requirements. Although behavioural studies have taught us just how flexible visual word representations are in the brain, the trivial fact that we can distinguish between anagrams demands that these representations somehow carry letter order. In this chapter we present a connectionist network developed so as to test a simple hypothesis on the character of the orthographic code: that its flexibility is a by-product of location invariance. We then illustrate a more explanatory aspect of the modelling approach to gain some insights into the kind of code used by this location invariant network -how it actually keeps track of letter order. Implications for the field of visual word recognition and future research are discussed.