We trained three topologies of backpropagation neural networks to discriminate 2000 words (lexical representations) presented at different positions of a horizontal letter array. The first topology (zero-deck) contains no hidden layer, the second (one-deck) has a single hidden layer, and for the last topology (two-deck), the task is divided in two subtasks implemented as two stacked neural netw...

Chinese adults literate only in Chinese characters could not add or delete individual consonants in spoken Chinese words. A comparable group of adults, literate in alphabetic spelling as well as characters, could perform the same tasks readily and accurately. The two groups were similar in education and experience but differed in age and consequently in whether they had learned an alphabetic wr...

A theory of how children progress through different phases of reading should be an asset both to reading researchers and teachers alike. The present paper provides a brief review of Ehri’s influential four phases of reading development: pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic and consolidated alphabetic. The model is flexible enough to acknowledge that children do not necessarily pr...

The laterality difference in the occipitotemporal region between Chinese (bilaterality) and alphabetic languages (left laterality) has been attributed to their difference in visual appearance. However, these languages also differ in orthographic transparency. To disentangle the effect of orthographic transparency from visual appearance, we trained subjects to read the same artificial script eit...

Visual word recognition in alphabetic languages such as English has been shown to have left hemisphere (LH) lateralization and argued to be linked to the LH superiority in language processing. Nevertheless, Chinese character recognition has been shown to be more bilateral or right hemisphere (RH) lateralized and thus is a counterexample of this claim. LH processing has been shown to have a high...

Visual word recognition in alphabetic languages such as English has been shown to have left hemisphere (LH) lateralization and argued to be linked to the LH superiority in language processing. Nevertheless, Chinese character recognition has been shown to be more bilateral or right hemisphere (RH) lateralized and thus is a counterexample of this claim. LH processing has been shown to have a high...

A series of techniques is being developed to postprocess noisy, multifont, nonformatted OCR data on a word basis to 1 ) determine if a field is alphabetic or numeric; 2) verify that an alphabetic word is legitimate; 3 ) fetch from a dictionary a set of potential entries using a garbled word as a key; and 4) error-correct the garbled word by selecting the most likely dictionary word. Four algori...

Controversy over the role of phonics in reading instruction has persisted for over 100 years, making the reading wars seem like an inevitable fact of American history. In the mid-nineteenth century, Horace Mann, the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, railed against the teaching of the alphabetic code—the idea that letters represented sounds—as an impediment to reading for meanin...

According to a simple anatomical and functional model of word reading, letters displayed in one hemifield are first analysed through a cascade of contralateral retinotopic areas, which compute increasingly abstract representations. Eventually, an invariant representation of letter identities is created in the visual word form area (VWFA), reproducibly located within the left occipito-temporal s...

Parents and teachers worldwide believe that a visual environment rich with print can contribute to young children's literacy. Children seem to recognize words in familiar logos at an early age. However, most of previous studies were carried out with alphabetic scripts. Alphabetic letters regularly correspond to phonological segments in a word and provide strong cues about the identity of the wh...